


Fixer Upper

by lisbon99



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Slow Burn, Tommy Merlyn is Alive
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-10-02
Updated: 2015-07-29
Packaged: 2018-02-19 15:54:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 30,442
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2394281
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lisbon99/pseuds/lisbon99
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tommy Merlyn survives the Undertaking, but at the cost of his friendship with Oliver Queen, who slips away quietly to Lian Yu. Felicity, concerned that - alone and friendless - Tommy may self-destruct, decides to visit, feed and annoy him (not necessarily in that order) until he pulls the pieces of his life back together. But when Oliver returns, Tommy is alarmed to discover that he isn't ready to watch Felicity fade into obscurity and out of his life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Author’s Notes: Noooooo – once again I have been pulled unwillingly into another fandom! I blame Tumblr – you can only see so many Olicity gifsets without undergoing some sort of weird conversion process. However, oddly enough, it wasn’t Olicity that finally pushed me to write, it was Flommy (Felicity/Tommy)! The blame for this is a little bit more specific: absentlyabbie and rosietwiggs are the two main culprits (please check out their blogs and their fics). 
> 
> I will be forever crushed that these two never appeared to meet in canon. Felicity did apparently text Tommy (there’s a screenshot of his Inbox out there somewhere) but sadly we will never know how many times, or what it was about. 
> 
> Background for this fic: So, the story is canon-compliant right up until Tommy gets into a tight spot while saving Laurel at CNRI in 1x23 – however, in this fic, Oliver manages to save him before he gets skewered by a piece of rebar. They’re on the verge of completely reconciling, but Tommy discovers that Oliver did kill his father and cuts Oliver out of his life once and for all. Thus Oliver still decides to retreat to Lian Yu. Laurel, unwilling to be a point of disagreement for the two of them, seeks distance and reflection in Central City. Felicity and Diggle are left to rebuild – but when Felicity realises that Tommy is alone and unsupported in a city full of people who hate his guts, she decides to keep an eye on him until Oliver returns (whether Tommy likes it or not). 
> 
> Pairings: This is intended to be Felicity/Tommy. However, I do love Olicity so that will be addressed in this fic as well.

She’s pretty sure that – whatever he might claim, if asked – he’s actually only barely tolerating her intrusion into his personal life (and space). Oh, he’s certainly doing a good job of pretending he doesn’t mind – better than she would have expected, in the circumstances – but nonetheless, his patience must be wearing thin. Sooner or later, she’ll need to back off, she realises.

God, she really wishes Oliver would stop moping and just get his ass back to Starling City.

“Okay,” she says, hunched over the coffee table, studying the DVDs laid out neatly in front of her. “So I brought a few different things – I mean, obviously it’s nothing compared to Netflix, and I totally would have signed into my account, but…” She casts a mournful look at the dented, deceased laptop lying on the floor, “I kind of assumed your laptop would be in working order.”

Tommy shifts uncomfortably on the couch. “It was a… uh, casualty, I guess.”

He doesn’t supply any further details, and he doesn’t need to. It’s hardly the first broken item she’s encountered in his apartment over the last few weeks. He’s working through things as best he can. Her only hope is that he doesn’t self-destruct before he can pull himself out the other side of this.

Which, obviously, is why she’s loading the first disc of her Community boxset into his surprisingly _not_ cutting-edge DVD player. (Another failed assumption: before she first visited, she’d thought his home cinema system would be on a par with Barney Stinson’s full-wall illegally imported TV screen. Not that she’s judging, of course. Tommy has his own reasons for living in a poky apartment with small windows, peeling paint and a mysterious smell in the kitchen. If he wants to discuss it, she’s more than ready, but she’s visited six times now and he hasn’t exactly shown signs of becoming more talkative.)

While the DVD menu loads, she rifles through the other bag she brought with her. “So, I’ve got some snacks,” she says, laying them out on the coffee table. “Uh, Doritos, M&Ms, Oreos… some weird gummy thingies…” she smiles and shrugs helplessly, “I didn’t really know what you’d like, and you didn’t text me back, so…”

She glances up. He isn’t looking at her; he’s staring out of the small window next to the kitchen door. The heavy orange cast of the street light outside glows through the dirt on the outside of the glass. She wonders where his mind is tonight – in Central City with Laurel? Or Lian Yu with Oliver?

Either way, she’ll likely never find out.

“Okay,” she says, as brightly as she can manage, “so this is a pretty good comedy series, I think you’ll like it.” She settles herself back on the couch, curling her legs underneath her as she thumbs the remote to select the first episode.

Tommy’s quiet, and she fights to keep from glancing at him too much. She assumes he’s still lost in thought, not even looking at the screen, but ten minutes into the episode, he says, “I think I’ve seen this before.” He meets her eyes briefly. “The Spanish teacher is insane, right?”

“Oh. Yeah, that’s the one.” She looks at him with surprise, a smile tugging at her lips. “Well, never mind, I brought plenty of backup options – I’ve got the Hangover films, or Mad Men, or – ooh, Cool Runnings, that’s a really great –”

“No, leave this on,” Tommy says, turning back to the TV. “I remember thinking it was good.”

“Okay.” But it isn’t okay, she realises. She has _no idea_ what she’s doing.

Watching TV with Tommy Merlyn? Sure, no problem.

Watching TV with a guy who lost his father and his best friend on the same day – a guy who now bears the brunt of the hatred of Starling citizens for the actions of his father, not to mention faces constant pressure from the insensitive, self-serving board members of Merlyn Global to do something, _anything_ to save a flagging corporation?

It isn’t TV, she acknowledges. In a way, it’s a suicide watch.

Diggle had said as much to her tonight, before she came here. “Oliver would appreciate what you’re doing for that kid, Felicity,” he’d remarked, wiping sweat from his brow as he leaned against her desk.

She’d snorted softly. “I’m not sure what I’m doing,” she’d confessed. “Annoying him, probably. But I just… I can’t leave him there alone, Dig. He hardly comes out.”

Dig’s hand was warm on her shoulder. “You’re doing more than you realise. More than _he_ realises, even.” A grim look passed across his face. “Nobody goes through something like that without facing some pretty dark thoughts – especially not a guy with Merlyn’s history.” He looked down at her. “I’m not saying you can fix him, but I’ll bet you’ve pulled him back from the edge more than once.”

Truthfully, she doubts she’s done that much, given that Tommy hardly says a word to her. But at least if he knows she’s coming – if he knows he has one friend – then things might look marginally less bleak.

She reaches over to the coffee table and grasps for a packet.

Failing that, there’s always chocolate.

* * *

 

Her next visit comes two days later. She normally gives him a little more space, but it’s her day off and she’s on her way home from the foundry with his repaired laptop in her car – it seems like a good excuse, she figures.

The other excuse is that she has cleaning supplies as well.

“You didn’t text,” says Tommy curtly when he opens the door. He doesn’t seem particularly surprised, though.

“Why?” she teases. “Would you have tidied up for me?”

He throws her a sour look as he steps back to let her through. “No. I might have barricaded the door, though.”

She holds up his laptop, bouncing it gently in her hands. “Don’t think I wouldn’t use this as a battering ram, if it came to it.”

He raises his hands in mock self-defence. “Scary. Clearly my defences aren’t up to scratch if a three pound aluminium laptop can breach my front door.”

Felicity eyes the deadbolt that doesn’t align properly and has rusted over from lack of use. “I’d say that’s a given already.” She hands him the laptop, and hesitates before holding up the other bag. “Uh, I might have an ulterior motive for being here, sort of.” She takes his raised eyebrow as an invitation to continue. “Look, I know I’ve made jokes about how this place fails about twenty different building codes – and it totally does, that’s a serious problem – but… you can’t be happy living like this. And I’m not saying this is the solution to…” she waves vaguely in his general direction, “all of your many, many problems, but… I just think it might help if we… cleaned up a bit…”

His expression is carefully shuttered. He folds his arms across his chest and scowls down at the floor. Really, she thinks, he couldn’t throw up any more barriers if he tried. “You can, if you want,” he offers gruffly. “I think I’ll pass.”

She considers this, weighing up the pros and cons of trying to push him a little bit more. In the end, she concedes defeat, and leaves him in the living room to tackle the kitchen by herself. Guilt and frustration wage heavy war in her heart, and she finds cleaning to be a good distraction.

They don’t really know each other, she acknowledges, as she removes the meagre contents of the cupboards – a few chipped mugs and plates that have seen better days – in order to wipe the shelves clean. If she’d met Tommy properly before everything went down, maybe this wouldn’t be like wading uphill through treacle. But as it was, they’d nodded at each other maybe a couple of times in Verdant.

Once, she’d sent him a text asking if she could move some stuff around behind the bar in order to access a panel that covered some of the data lines supplying the foundry. He hadn’t replied, and she’d gone ahead and done it anyway. Later she found out he’d just broken up with Laurel, and probably hadn’t been in the mood to even think about a weird text from a virtual stranger.

And that, she reflects, washing the dishes carefully before they go back into the clean cupboards, is no doubt part of their core problem now – she’s still a stranger to him. Granted, thanks to her loose tongue, he probably knows more about her now than he ever wanted to. But that doesn’t change the fact that in those early days after the rug had been pulled from underneath his feet, he’d been raw and vulnerable and on the verge of breaking – and some stranger had shown up on his doorstep carrying a metric ton of food and some sympathy cards from a surprisingly broad group of people (all carefully vetted by Diggle, of course) and had chattered endlessly to fill the awkward silence until she finally realised she might not be a welcome guest.

She pauses in the middle of squirting Mr Muscle onto the stove, listening carefully for any sound from the living room.

She shrugs and continues, scrubbing furiously until her muscles ache. It isn’t that she enjoys cleaning, especially, but it’s kind of cathartic, and she honestly thinks that Tommy might start to feel a little more comfortable in this apartment if he can walk into his own kitchen without gagging.

She doesn’t quite know when he started renting this place.

She suspects it must have been before the earthquakes, because most landlords would probably have outright refused to harbour a Merlyn in the current climate. Did he start living here even before then? She’d heard he’d reconciled with his father and had moved out of Laurel’s apartment, so naturally she’d expected that he would have moved back to Merlyn Mansion.

Certainly, given that access to his trust fund had been restored – and in fact, all Merlyn assets now exist solely in his name – she wonders why he picked a place like this to live? Is he simply seeking anonymity now there’s a price on his head? Or is he punishing himself for the crimes his father committed against the city?

She suppresses a snort. Oliver and Tommy appear to have chosen remarkably similar coping strategies; if things between them weren’t so bad, they could have booked a package tour to Lian Yu together.

She loses track of time for a while. The fridge/freezer isn’t too bad, but that’s mainly because Tommy apparently isn’t buying any food. She’s disappointed to see that a lot of the frozen meals she’d brought are still sitting there, untouched.

By the time she’s done, it actually looks pretty decent. The laminate countertops are an uninspiring shade of grey, but they’re clean, and the metalwork gleams brightly. She’s managed to work the small window next to the sink open – the wooden frame is poor quality, and probably it won’t take much for it to fall apart, but at least there’s some fresh air.

The smell is still there, faintly. She frowns and unleashes three short, sharp bursts of Febreze.

She’s still standing there, inhaling deeply and trying to decide if she needs to start looking for a dead rat when the door opens unexpectedly and Tommy’s face appears around the corner. “You know you’ve been here for nearly three hours, right?” he begins – and then the wary frown disappears from his face as he takes in the sight. “Whoa.”

He steps into the kitchen fully, his hand reaching out to skim the bright white metal of the stove. He opens the refrigerator briefly, raising an eyebrow when he sees a frozen meal sitting on the bottom shelf to defrost. “Now I really do feel like a bachelor.”

She squats, gathering her cleaning supplies together and shoving them in the cupboard underneath the sink. “Yeah, well, consider grocery shopping to be your homework.” She pulls herself to her feet, wiping her hands on her jeans. Her hair started out in a nice neat bun on top of her head, but she can feel it sagging now, annoying loose bits drifting forward into her face. “You’re welcome, by the way.”

Tommy grimaces briefly. “Right. Sorry. Thank you.” He taps the fridge door closed and shoves his hands into his pockets, eyes glued to the floor.

“No problem.” And… it really isn’t. This might actually be the most significant reaction she’s managed to pull from him in a whole month. She gestures to the living room with her thumb. “I’ll leave the rest til next time, okay? Unless…” her lips quirk into an awkward grin “ _you_ want to try it out? It’s super satisfying, I promise!”

The grin slips from her face as Tommy shifts awkwardly on his feet. “Anyway,” she says, “I’d better go. Uh, I won’t be around for the next few days – sorry. I’ve got some stuff I need to sort out, and it’s a big mess, so…” She trails off, hoping that doesn’t sound like a made-up excuse. The truth is, she and Dig are moving some stuff in and out of the foundry, and they need the cover of darkness – which, on summer nights like these, comes pretty late.

“Don’t forget about the other meals,” she tells Tommy as she slips past him through the door. “Next time I’ll bring a kettle. I’ve got one I hardly use, so you can just have –”

“Do you want to stay a while longer?” Tommy interrupts her. “I mean – we’ve got those DVDs – _your_ DVDs, really… I just thought maybe –”

“Yes,” she blurts out, without thinking. God, she hopes that was the right answer. Maybe he was just offering to be polite – ugh, no, is it too late to take it back?

“Great,” Tommy replies, no trace of annoyance on his face. “I’ll call for takeout. Pizza sound good?”

She blinks.

_What just happened?_

* * *

 

They make it through nine episodes before Tommy passes out in a cheese coma. He hasn’t exactly been chatty, but he’s been paying enough attention to snort with soft laughter from time to time. She glances over at him, taking the opportunity to study his features carefully.

In sleep, he still looks youthful, she thinks – the lines of stress and worry have all been smoothed away. His little frown persists; she longs to press her thumb to the top of his nose and rub it away. The stubble on his jawline looks nearly a week old, but it doesn’t hurt his handsome features. No wonder he and Oliver were so beloved by the press, she thinks – the two of them are ridiculously photogenic. It’s so easy to picture the two of them laughing, arms slung over each other’s shoulders as they stagger out of a party or a nightclub.

They can still have that, she thinks stubbornly. They _can_ fix this. And no, maybe it won’t all be midnight pool parties and early morning scandals again – because that isn’t who they are anymore. But they can forgive each other, and lean on each other again, and be the best friends they so obviously _want_ to be. She believes that wholeheartedly.

She levers herself up carefully off the couch, avoiding that one creaky spring in the middle. She won’t breach the privacy of Tommy’s bedroom – that’s just a step too far – but there’s a little closet next to the bathroom where the water heater lives. The shelf near the top has a couple of blankets and some bed linen. She stands on tip-toes to reach, and nearly brings the whole stack down onto her head.

The blankets feel soft and luxurious, and what’s more, they smell clean. She’ll bet they were among the only things Tommy took from Merlyn Mansion when he moved out.

He shifts a little as she drapes it over him, but doesn’t wake. She breathes a quiet sigh of relief, and stealthily tidies everything away, switching off the TV to leave only a small dim light illuminating her way out of the apartment.

Maybe she’s reading too much into it, but tonight he let her in – _really_ let her in for the first time. That’s progress, she tells herself firmly. It _matters_. So keep trying, Smoak.

She closes the door softly behind her and hopes he sleeps through the night.

* * *

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tommy Merlyn survives the Undertaking, but at the cost of his friendship with Oliver Queen, who slips away quietly to Lian Yu. Felicity, concerned that - alone and friendless - Tommy may self-destruct, decides to visit, feed and annoy him (not necessarily in that order) until he pulls the pieces of his life back together. But when Oliver returns, Tommy is alarmed to discover that he isn't ready to watch Felicity fade into obscurity and out of his life.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh my gosh, I was so overwhelmed by the response the Chapter 1 – thank you so, so much to everybody for your reviews/favourites/follows/kudos etc. I’m still not up to date with replies etc but I promise I will catch up eventually. This chapter was delayed partly by a mental block, and partly by 3x01 and the variety of feelings it produced, which I will refrain from discussing in case anybody hasn’t seen it yet.
> 
> Massive thanks to absentlyabbie and rosietwiggs for being so amazingly supportive and recommending my fic on Tumblr. I hope you guys are both doing OK. I know this chapter won’t solve anything but I hope it provides a brief distraction. Girlthursdayy, my partner in flailing and capslock screaming, I miss you and will message you soon!

She and Diggle eat takeout for three nights in a row while they put Phase Two of ‘Operation: Lair Makeover’ into action (which she thinks would make an amazing reality series, but probably the world isn’t quite ready – yet). Eating so late gives her heartburn, and eating this quantity of utter crap is affecting her mental faculties at a minimum. “Urgh,” she groans from the floor, one hand on her belly. “Can’t… move…”

“We are seriously falling behind on your training,” Diggle says flatly. “Can you even do a push-up? Just one?”

She squints at him. “You mean the things you and Oliver do with just your little pinky finger on the floor? Um, I’m gonna go with no.”

He rolls his eyes as he tidies the empty containers into a neat little pile. “Yeah, you’re real cute. I know you think I’m going to forget about this by tomorrow, but we _are_ going to restart your training – and soon.” He gestures to the vast open space around them – rubble mostly cleared away after weeks of hard work, and boxes of new and exciting equipment waiting to be unloaded. “We’ll have plenty of time once this is done.”

She scowls at him as she rolls awkwardly to one side, planting one knee on the floor and pushing herself up in the manner of a heavily pregnant woman.

Diggle shakes his head. “Christ,” he mutters. “You couldn’t even _run_ right now. I’d have to carry you.”

She hears the amusement in his voice and grins widely. “Not exactly an incentive for me to start working out, my large cuddly friend.”

The smile seems to spread across his face against his will. “Felicity Smoak,” he says warmly, closing his hand over her shoulder, “what the hell would I do without you?”

She slides her arms around his waist and squeezes tightly, pleased to find that he hardly hesitates before enveloping her in his arms (and _yes_ , she has always secretly wanted a Diggle hug because she suspected it would feel like accidentally falling inside a marshmallow – and she was _right_ , damn it). “I’m not sure,” she says into his chest, “but you’d probably spend less on takeout.”

His laugh rumbles right through her lungs, and it feels so weird that she can’t help but laugh too.

As he draws back, he glances at the separate pile of slightly smaller boxes in the corner, carefully positioned to prominently display the red and white ‘Take care! Fragile!’ stickers. Felicity hasn’t told him what’s in those yet, but their existence evidently reminds him of the fact that currently, money really is no object. “Apparently we could afford our own private chef these days,” he remarks ruefully. “Did your bank manager stop hassling you?”

She wrinkles her nose. “Not so much. But it’s fine – my cool million is going to shrink back down to a more manageable six hundred dollars in no time.” She feels a flutter of excitement in her stomach at the thought of the cool new tech she’s going to special order – once she’s re-routed everything through a disposable account overseas, of course.

Diggle frowns down at her. “I really wish you’d let me pick up the tab for more of this stuff, Felicity. We’re a team – I want you to let me contribute something more than just Pad Thai.”

She moves around him, shrugging off her hoodie and dumping it over one of the larger crates. “Definitely not getting into this with you again.” She grabs one of the buckets of spackling paste and kneels down next to it to crack the plastic seal. “Come on, Dig, these cracks aren’t going to plaster themselves.” She tosses a glare over her shoulder to indicate that he should drop the matter or face uncomfortable consequences.

Diggle gives a little grunt of dissatisfaction, but doesn’t push the envelope. She can tell something’s bothering him, but she doesn’t think it’s really about the money. He hasn’t dropped Carly’s name in nearly a week, and she keeps finding breakfast bar wrappers in his car, suggesting he’s sleeping at his own apartment more often. She wants to bring it up, but most nights Diggle seems glad to be here – and particularly glad to be doing physical labour. She doesn’t want to ruin his comfort zone with unwanted therapy.

She decides to put it aside, at least for tonight, and focus on the drudge work that lies ahead.

The foundry hadn’t seemed to be too badly affected at the time of the earthquakes; for a few terrifying moments, as dust and pieces of plaster fell in chunks around her, she’d honestly thought she was about to be crushed within a collapsing building. But the worst thing to happen, in the end, had been a massive power outage. She’d been able to safely make her way out, but a combination of aftershocks and subsidence had taken out part of the staircase and triggered a slow collapse of one wall. They hadn’t wanted to risk getting stuck if there were more aftershocks to come, so Felicity had done her best with the first aid kit in Diggle’s car.

Nearly five weeks later, the wall is stable again (though Diggle insists she has too much faith in his skills). Once all the cracks are filled in, they’ll be able to get to work re-wiring and fitting the new lighting and equipment.

It’s dull work, but they’re both emotionally invested in this place – and in the man who left it behind – and that keeps them going just long enough to make each night worth it.

Of course, the other bonus is that she’s finally laid to rest the notion that she and Diggle are reliant upon Oliver to be the common ground between them. They’ve never exactly been awkward with each other, but she knows for a fact that in the early days, it was Diggle who had objected to her involvement in their nightly activities rather than Oliver ‘soul-crushing guilt’ Queen. She understands why, and she doesn’t hold it against him. But in the back of her mind, she’s always worried a little that – given the choice – Diggle would still prefer to remove her from the team altogether.

But since the day Diggle came to tell her that Oliver had run away from home like a melodramatic nine year old, they’ve hardly spent any time apart, and she finds that talking to him is ridiculously easy. They can go several nights without even mentioning Oliver (which is an achievement for other reasons as well, but she’s pretty proud of this one).

So, yes, Oliver continues to annoy and frustrate her from thousands of miles away. But secretly, she’ll always be grateful to him for giving her this time with Diggle – and giving her a friend she knows she’ll never lose.

* * *

 

On Thursday, when they realise that the cracks in the far wall extend too deeply to be merely patched up, and that the entire thing will need to be completely re-plastered, Felicity texts Tommy to let him know that she won’t be able to visit for another few nights. Guilt hangs heavy in her gut, especially when she pictures him sitting in the same spot she left him in – slumped down a little on the couch, head nestled into the corner cushion.

He’ll be okay, she tries to tell herself. You were probably starting to get on his nerves a little – he’ll appreciate the space.

Tommy doesn’t text her back, which is actually pretty typical. If he does reply, it’s usually limited to one-word answers. It’s a little like texting Oliver, except Oliver used to open the emoji keyboard by accident sometimes; the random animals added a certain spice to his replies.

Still, she worries enough that around midnight, Diggle glances over at her lacklustre efforts with the trowel and sighs. “Look, just go over there,” he tells her impatiently. “You’re not going to be happy unless you’ve checked his pulse, and frankly I’ve got a dead great-grandmother who could lay down spackle faster than you right now.”

“No, it’s fine,” she says stubbornly, picking up the pace. “We said we’d get a second coat done tonight, and I am fully committed to the job.”

He steps closer, leaning down to rest his trowel against the bucket. “Believe me, Felicity, nobody could doubt your commitment to this – or even to Merlyn. But if anything, what you need is some time to yourself. Have you even stopped moving? You’re still going to work…”

“Yeah, well, that’s more of a waste of time than anything else,” she remarks, sounding disgusted. “The board wants all departments running at minimal capacity while they try to figure this all out, so they cut back a lot of people’s hours and _drastically_ limited our activities which…” She shakes her head, frustrated. “Ugh, so, basically I’m one of the few people still working full time – which by the way, if you want to become less popular in the workplace? One hundred percent effective, just FYI – and not only that, but nobody can be bothered to actually lift a finger when they _are_ in work. So guess who’s stuck picking up the slack? And I mean the totally boring slack, like the weirdo porn viruses that people pretend they got from looking at wedding photos on Facebook. Not the slightly more interesting slack like server upgrades or tweaking the firewall so idiot journalists can’t tunnel into our system.”

Diggle raises an eyebrow. “Is this you convincing me that you don’t need a break? Because I don’t really think you’ve understood the concept…”

She scowls at him. “Come on, let’s just finish this for tonight, okay? You need sleep as well, John – don’t think I haven’t noticed those bags under your eyes.”

He looks only mildly offended. “I’m rethinking my sympathy towards you.”

“Liar,” she says fondly.

She’s proven right when, as they’re parting ways for the night, Diggle suddenly remembers an unspecified ‘family event’ the following night and says casually, “Guess you might as well take the opportunity to go over to Merlyn’s, then.”

She narrows her eyes. “Oh, really?”

He doesn’t budge. “Really. And don’t you even _think_ of coming here to work by yourself.” He’s jabbing an accusing finger at her now, which feels excessive, in her opinion.

Not for the first time, she wishes she’d been able to set up some of her new and exciting foundry-monitoring tech. It might help her sound more threatening when she says, “As long as you don’t try it either, John Diggle.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” he says, laughter in his eyes. “Go on home, now.”

She jabs two fingers towards her eyes, and then at him, walking backwards to her car. If she were really inclined to check Diggle’s whereabouts tomorrow, she could activate the tracker on his phone (installed with his consent, of course, although using it in those circumstances would probably constitute a breach of trust). But the truth is, she’s really relieved to have the opportunity to – at the very least – see Tommy with her own eyes.

In all probability, he doesn’t rely on her visits nearly as much as her behaviour would suggest. But she knows in her gut that she’s not quite done with this rescue mission yet, even if she’s still making it up as she goes along.

* * *

 

The next night, she makes a big bowl of pasta salad and buys strawberries, peaches and star fruit at the market, Diggle’s dire warnings about restarting her training ringing in her head.

It’s only as she’s climbing the final flight of stairs to reach Tommy’s floor that she realises – she hasn’t texted him to tell him that she’s coming, which means he’ll probably be irritable and sarcastic for the first half an hour, acting as though she must be purposely trying to catch him off guard.

She doesn’t care. If it means she can assure herself of his relative wellbeing – and maybe catch a few more episodes of Community into the bargain – then she’ll deal with whatever he wants to dish out.

But as it happens, he evidently doesn’t want to dish anything out at all.

She knocks on his door twice before she hears movement inside. (He has a doorbell, but it’s temperamental in its old age, and when it does work it sounds like a goose being strangled, so she doesn’t use it.) She hears the faint groan of the couch, and soft footsteps padding across the floor.

She waits patiently… but the door never opens.

She frowns, puzzled, and adjusts the grip on her Tupperware as she steps back a little, in case he can’t see her through the peephole. She even does a little wave, as if to reassure him that she comes in peace.

The floorboard on the other side of the door creaks, very softly, but still the door doesn’t open.

Cold disappointment curls around her heart as she realises: he doesn’t want to see her. She feels instantly mortified and a little bit nauseated, and all she wants is to get out of there as fast as possible. Quietly, she sets the Tupperware and the bag of fruit down outside the door and retreats, keeping her steps light.

At the top of the staircase, though, her stomach sinks when she hears the door open behind her.

“Felicity?” Tommy says, sounding utterly baffled. “Is that you?”

One hand on the rail, she turns around hesitantly. “Hi. Um, actually, I was just going – I just wanted to leave those there for you –” she gestures to the food – “and now I have, so I can totally get out of your hair –”

Tommy takes a few steps into the hallway, and she catches the expression on his face for the first time. He looks surprised and… _relieved_. “I didn’t realise it was you,” he explains hurriedly. “The lens in the thingy is broken, and you didn’t… I mean, you said you were going to be busy, so I just assumed…”

“Oh,” she manages, and the rolling in her gut dies down significantly. She casts around for the remainder of her response, and comes up blank.

“You don’t have to leave,” Tommy says, and for a second she catches a glimpse of the desperation he’s struggling to hide. “I wasn’t avoiding you, in case you were wondering. You don’t have to…”

As he trails off, she weighs it up as quickly and carefully as she can. Is she so easy to read? And if so, is his offer motivated more by a sense of obligation to be kind to some strange, needy girl rather than a genuine wish for company?

If that’s the case, she should draw the line here. This was never supposed to be about satisfying her own need to haphazardly glue the fragments of her weird new family together. Calling that urge selfish might be unfair, but if it winds up taking precedence over the actual priority of making sure Tommy Merlyn doesn’t starve to death in a poorly lit bachelor pad from hell, then it would also be true.

On the other hand – maybe he just wants a friend.

“Sure,” she says, coming back up the stairs before she can change her mind. “Have you eaten? I made tons of pasta salad – oh, and there’s some garlic chicken in your freezer, we could heat that up.” She collects the food and shuffles past him through the front door. “I can’t eat too much, though, I’m trying to stay healthy. Apparently there’s some exercise in my future and I don’t think carrying around a food baby will help me beat my previous record of six crunches in a row. I brought some fruit, by the way – sort of a mix, I didn’t really know what you’d like –”

She doesn’t catch the smile at first. She lets him follow her into the kitchen (still largely clean, actually) while she tries to remember how long she has to cook the chicken for, and at what temperature. Then she serves up some salad in case Tommy’s hungry already – carbs be damned, she thinks recklessly, she can have a little more later with the chicken if need be – and grabs a couple forks.

When she turns around, he’s right behind her, and she nearly throws the plates up in the air. “Jeez, Tommy…”

She trails off as she realises that – yes, that’s an actual smile; a very little one, but it’s there and it reaches his eyes just enough to noticeably lift the weary lines of his face. Coupled with his stubble, which looks a little neater than last time, she’d have to be blind not to notice how attractive he is.

She wonders vaguely what might have happened if Tommy had been the one to come to her office eight months ago with a crappy story and a plea for help, instead of Oliver. She might not know Tommy that well, but she’s beginning to get the distinct impression that his brand of charm is wildly different compared to his best friend’s, and probably – in this fictional scenario she’s imagining – would have resulted in almost catastrophic verbal diarrhoea on her part. She’s pretty sure she would have spilled her own credit card information before segueing neatly into the story of her worst sexual experience, and finishing up with a demonstration of the app that charts her monthly cycle.

Shaking her head to clear these disturbing thoughts, she aims a gentle kick at Tommy’s shin. “Come on, move your butt.” God, she can feel her cheeks heating. This is ridiculous.

They sit through three episodes before he says another word. She’s just stretching her legs out in front of her, rolling her ankles and wondering how many Jimmy Choos she could buy with the hundreds of thousands of dollars in her bank account, when Tommy says, “How did you know where I lived?”

Her head snaps around so fast it actually hurts. “What?”

Her surprise comes from the fact that that he’s speaking at all, not from the question itself, but he evidently thinks it’s the latter. “It’s a valid question,” he says defensively. “I never told anybody about this place except my accountant. I definitely didn’t tell Oliver. So how did you find out I live here?”

As she stares at him, it occurs to her that Tommy has no idea what exactly she does for Oliver.

Well, that’s not strictly true. Oliver had deployed his standard ‘fixing the wi-fi’ excuse when she and Tommy had crossed paths in Verdant, so she supposes he must know that she works in IT.

On the day that she’d first come here, she’d introduced herself as, “Felicity Smoak. I, uh, work with Oliver. Or maybe worked, I guess – I don’t know. By the way, when I say ‘work’, I’m referring to both jobs – you know, the boring one as well as the slightly more interesting-but-kind-of-deadly one… Anyway, I just came to see if you were okay after everything that happened… I know ‘okay’ is a pretty relative term… and probably totally inaccurate for your current state of mind – which makes that a really stupid question to have asked in the first place, yay for me…”

Unsurprisingly, he hadn’t been in the mood to do or say anything. He’d been moving stiffly, she’d noticed; the wound on his side had still been relatively fresh at the time. She’d almost offered to check and change the dressing – so used to doing it for Diggle or Oliver – but had bitten her tongue before the words slipped out.

So, she’d never specified her role in Oliver’s other career, and he’d never got around to asking – until now.

“Oliver never said anything about my, uh, background?” she prods, hoping to find that some groundwork might have already been laid.

Tommy shifts on the couch, angling his torso to better observe her. It’s unnerving, having his undivided attention for this length of time. “Well, you were in my phone as ‘wi-fi girl’ until a few weeks ago, so… I had a working theory. But he never exactly went into detail about who was helping him.” His mouth twists. “That bodyguard has to be in on it, though, right? I mean, those two are weirdly inseparable.”

“We’re a team, the three of us,” she agrees hesitantly, hoping she isn’t screwing anything up by revealing this much. “I’m restricted to behind the scenes stuff, though – well, mostly. I handle communications, law enforcement liaison, information sourcing, uh… systems access… and I’m running out of ways to make this sound legal.”

Tommy blinks at her. “You’re some kind of Sandra Bullock hacker girl?”

Her lips press together in a thin line. “Not exactly,” she grits out, “and I have a number of problems with that movie – excellent acting ability notwithstanding – but anyway… yes, you could describe what I do as ‘hacking’. In part, at least.”

“Uh-huh.” He considers this. “So… what? You hacked into my accounts or something? Is that how you found out about this place?”

She winces. She’d somewhat forgotten the original question. “Not your personal bank accounts, no. I started with your basic personnel file at Merlyn Global which was a little out of date. But Merlyn Global’s legal department holds separate files regarding your individual assets, including your stock portfolio, properties, and any tangible assets of significant value like cars, technology, yadda yadda. Obviously, this place –” she makes a vague gesture with her hand, “- doesn’t count as an asset because you don’t own it. But your asset management team also cross-referenced last month’s summary with your most recent tax return.” She shrugs, aiming for nonchalance but probably looking queasy instead. “Those guys are thorough, by the way. So, yeah – I realise I crossed a line, or maybe several – and I’m sorry, Tommy, but… I’m also not. Because the truth is, what happened was pretty shitty and it just seems like anything could have happened after that, and nobody would have found out until it was too late, so… I guess I’m saying: sorry for the methods, but not for the result.”

As soon as the words are out, she feels relieved.

She’s never felt ashamed of her job – either of them – so coming clean about what they involve is more like an item on a checklist at this point, but the prospect of discussing her actual motivation for coming here has been weighing heavily on her mind, more so than she’d realised.

It occurs to her that she has just intimated that she thinks he might be suicidal.

From the astonished look on his face, it also occurs to her that she has no idea how he’s going to react.

* * *

 

Tommy can’t remember how he got to this point.

He means this both literally and figuratively.

He remembers CNRI, or most of it – remembers Laurel, and the panic that had risen in his chest at the idea that he might lose her. Remembers the fear for his own life, shortly after that.

His chest still aches from time to time. The rebar had been aiming for his heart – irony he still doesn’t appreciate, weeks after the fact – and Oliver had pulled him out just enough for it to miss, gouging into the rib space along his chest wall instead. His torn muscle has healed well enough, though he doesn’t think he’ll be running any marathons any time soon.

It’ll scar, he supposes.

_That’s okay,_ he thinks. _Chicks dig scars._

Old Tommy comes out with thoughts like that, once in a while. It’s a relief to know he’s in there, in some ways, even if it is weird to think of him as a separate person. Sometimes Tommy imagines that Old Tommy ran away to hide after CNRI, and that that must have been why he’d felt as if he had a different voice for those first few days – hostile and scratchy.

Old Tommy doesn’t have the guts to handle everything that happened, so he creeps back to whisper stuff in Tommy’s ear and then runs away again, leaving New Tommy – cold, broken and bitter – to deal with reality.

Old Tommy was a child, he thinks uncharitably. On the cusp of growing up, maybe, but still a child in all the ways that counted. He hadn’t deserved what had happened but his inability to cope in the aftermath had placed an unacceptable burden on New Tommy. He’s bitter and resentful towards that old version of him, he realises. So much so that instead of accepting that it’s really himself he hates (old and new and everything in between), he prefers to imagine some irresponsible, carefree kid who shrugs and smiles in the face of every accusation Tommy wants to throw.

He’s had a lot of time to analyse this coping strategy – and yes, he recognises it for what it is. That said, he honestly wonders if he’s losing his mind (or if maybe he’s already lost it). The days blur together, and some mornings he wakes up with a vague sense that years have gone by – that he lives alone and forgotten, while the world has moved on.

Then he turns on the TV and it’s like a slap in the face – newsreaders talking about ‘the fall of Merlyn Global’, the ‘devastating aftermath of the earthquakes’ and the fact that Moira Queen remains in custody – in part for her own protection.

The last two times he’s done this, the jarring sensation has been almost overpowering, and he’s becoming concerned that he may actually be losing his grip on reality.

So when Felicity Smoak looks at him with those arresting blue eyes and says the words ‘pretty shitty’ before barrelling headfirst into a suggestion that he might have wanted to off himself, part of him breathes a sigh of blissful relief at the idea of finally being able to discuss this with somebody who actually exists.

The other part bursts out laughing.

It feels weird in his throat – like a bizarre echo of himself, rattling around inside his skull. But it feels good, too; his ribs ache pleasantly, and he keeps hearing ‘pretty shitty’ every time he looks at her face, which sets him off again.

Eventually, though, her wide-eyed astonishment fades into an annoyed scowl. “Fine, whatever,” she grumbles, raising her hands in supplication. “You can shut up now. Excuse me for being concerned.”

He shakes his head, his laughter subsiding into soft snorts. “No, that’s not what I – I just never heard you swear before. And definitely not as a rhyme.”

She frowns as she thinks back to her choice of words – and then rolls her eyes. “Look, it just seemed like an appropriate description, that’s all.” She watches him carefully, and he wonders what it means when he sees the small flush of colour to her cheeks. “I wasn’t trying to rub salt in the wound, or anything. I just – I thought you might want to talk about it.”

Oh, he does. And the problem is, he specifically wants to talk about it with her.

The thing is, he thinks it’d be easy to say the words to her – to give voice to the fears that keep him awake at night. He’s pretty sure that she would listen carefully, for as long as it took, and then she’d probably say something gentle and supportive in that warm voice of hers, and it could be along the lines of ‘don’t forget to brush your teeth before bed’ and he’d _still_ feel a thousand times better.

It would be so easy.

But the truth is, he likes what they have now. He likes hearing his phone chime and knowing it’ll be her, saying, ‘Be there in an hour. Thai tonight? Text me if you need anything!’

He likes hearing the soft knock at his door, and the few seconds he allows himself to watch her furtively through the peephole, standing there with the dim light of the hallway illuminating her hair from behind – and the little half-wave she does, as if she isn’t sure whether he can see her or not.

He likes the way she fills up this dark, dismal place with constant chatter and warmth, the scent of her perfume lingering for hours after she’s gone, the bright colours against the neutral palette of his furniture, and the little touches that she leaves behind.

If he reveals even half of the dark thoughts he’s been entertaining since that one hellish night all those weeks ago, it will change all of that. She’ll listen to him, he knows she will… but what if she stops talking? What if somehow, he drags her down into the darkness with him?

So he shakes his head and turns back to the TV. “Forget about it,” he says, feeling cold already. “Let’s just watch this.”

He spends the rest of the night trying to pretend he isn’t hyperaware of the space between them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Arrghh, this became much longer and angstier than planned. Also, perspective switch! I am never certain about whether switching is a good or a bad thing, but I guess it would be hard to write about Tommy’s recovery without spending some time inside his mind. Also, there are certain key scenes later which will demand his perspective (as well as justify the M rating for this story… *whistles*)


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, I know, I am a terrible person – I can’t believe I haven’t updated this in so long. I swear I never abandoned it, I just got an extreme case of writer’s block for a while (partly exacerbated by problems as work which could not be ignored, partly by various ~feelings~ about the current season). It doesn’t help that a great deal of my inspiration for this fic comes from scenes which I imagine to take place several chapters down the road and I’m desperate to skip ahead. Anyway, I’m back in the swing of writing and I’m not going to let it slip again (she says, fingers crossed).
> 
> Many thanks go to **Abbie** and **girlthursday** , to whom I made various vague promises about working on this story and then went radio silent for a ridiculous amount of time – thank you for being so lovely and not murdering me (although your stories may kill me anyway so maybe I shouldn’t be so free with my gratitude!)
> 
> [ **NB** : Updated to fix a small formatting issue and insert one missing word.]

"To celebrate!" Felicity declares giddily, holding the match to the candle atop the specially-purchased cupcake. "Not only the achievement of practically rebuilding the lair – yes, I'm calling it that, Diggle, don't you dare rain on my parade – but also the utter miracle of not losing our minds over the last six weeks."

Diggle’s wry smile suggests he’s in firm agreement with her on that score. “I would have gone insane if I’d had to do all this without you,” he says, shaking his head as he glances around the foundry. “Hell, I would have gone insane months ago if you’d never come on board.”

She can’t help but grin as colour rises to her cheeks. “Hmm – might not argue with you on that one,” she remarks, casting a glance around the dim, chilly basement. “There’s an awful lot of testosterone in here at the best of times.”

Diggle’s eyebrow flickers. “Says the totally impartial third party observer.”

She shrugs easily. “Somebody has to keep a close eye on you two.”

The foundry is now structurally intact, and she and Diggle finished the re-wiring last night. She's almost sick with excitement at the prospect of setting up all the new equipment and getting her new technology online. Part of her is excited to think of Oliver's face when he comes back and sees it, all bright and shiny and new; the other part holds the somewhat more pessimistic view that he might not come back at all.

She frowns, her lips thinning as she pushes this thought out of her head. He’ll come back, even if they have to drag him kicking and screaming. As if to punctuate this assertion, she blows out the candle with one strong puff of air.

As they’re setting up the training area – salmon ladder already in place – Diggle glances over at her. “How’s it going with Merlyn?”

“A little better,” she replies thoughtfully. “He’s talking a little more. Not about anything significant, you know – just small talk, mostly. But that’s something, right?”

“Right,” Diggle concedes with a smile.

“And anyway,” she huffs, clumsily dragging one of the exercise mats to align it with the wall, “putting myself in his position, I don’t really know if I’d be opening up to… well, me… about anything really personal.”

Diggle makes a noise of disagreement. “I don’t know. I think I would.” He kicks his own mat into position and abruptly sits down on it, stretching his legs out in front of him. “For example… Carly and I broke up.”

“Oh, John…” She crosses the distance to sit down next to him, her fingers curling over his forearm for a few moments. “I’m so sorry. Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” he assures her – and he actually does seem to be at peace with it. “It happened a week ago, but the truth is, I knew it was inevitable. Carly spent a long time mourning my brother, and now she’s ready to move on – and I’m glad. But I’m not ready. Not with Deadshot still out there.” He presses his lips tight against a sigh, and glances down at her hand on his arm. “Believe me, I wish I could find some way to move forward – I don’t mean forget about Lawton, just… put him on the backburner enough to have a healthy relationship.” He lifts his other hand, and taps two fingers against his temple. “But he’s in here, and he won’t get out. I can’t tell Carly about everything I’m doing, and she deserves somebody who isn’t half-hiding all the time.”

Her heart twists with sympathy, and she curls her fingers tighter over his large wrist. “You’ll have that,” she says urgently. “You _will_ , John. There’s somebody out there for you – maybe it’s Carly, maybe there’s another woman… or, hey, a guy even… cause, you know, that’s totally your business and I don’t want to make any assumptions…” She stops and blows out a harsh breath. “Feel free to stop me at any time. But what I’m saying is – maybe some of it is about coming to terms with Deadshot and your brother. And maybe the rest of it is about finding the person who’ll be there for you even if coming to terms takes the rest of your life – somebody who’ll share the burden with you.”

She blinks, and turns an impressive shade of red. “Just to be clear – I was not trying to proposition you just then, I swear.”

Diggle claps his other hand over hers before she can remove it, smiling fondly at her. “Believe me, I’d have to be plain stupid to turn you down if you were – though God knows Oliver would tear me to shreds for even thinking about it – but trust me, I’ve heard enough of your accidental innuendos to know when you mean it and when you don’t.”

She pulls her hand away to smack his – ow, rock solid – chest. “What the hell, John? I _never_ mean it, that’s the whole point!”

(She carefully avoids addressing his off-the-cuff comment about Oliver’s perspective, and he doesn’t seem inclined to circle back, for which she’s grateful.)

Dig laughs suddenly. “Remember, ‘I said not noticed, right?’”

“Oh, _god_.” She buries her face in her hands. “I can’t believe you’re bringing that up. I felt mortified for days.” She tilts her face up, fingertips pressing into her cheeks. “But… I’ve said worse, you know.”

She can tell Diggle wants to ask – and there’s a silly, slightly reckless part of her that wants to tell him, even if just to claw back a vague sense of normality. She wants to pretend that she has that kind of friend again; the kind who’ll ply her with alcohol and ice cream, and drag from her the secrets that she would have spilled anyway – secrets like, ‘I want to climb him like a tree’, and ‘his _ass_ , oh my _god_ , just… _how_?!’ and ‘is he ever going to come back?’

Diggle is a wonderful, loyal friend. But the truth is, much as she knows he’d take her secrets to the grave, there’s still a part of her that feels like an outsider when it comes to him and Oliver. They’re both cut from the same cloth – both warriors with a goal and heavily-armoured hearts. They’ve always had problems on a greater scale than hers. She doesn’t want to keep her feelings to herself for the sake of martyrdom, but really, what is John going to do with this information?

She knows exactly what he’ll do.

He’ll sympathise, but he’ll warn her away nonetheless. He’ll say whatever he needs to say to make her think twice, and she really doesn’t need that, because she’s already on her sixth or seventh round of ‘this is a terrible idea’. (Maybe it’s more than that. She’s pretty sure she went through two or three iterations of that same thought on her first drive to the foundry with a bleeding vigilante in her back seat.)

More specifically, she doesn’t need another reason to feel like one day, the two of them are going to regret bringing her on board. She’s not going to be a liability just because she has feelings for Oliver, but they’ll disagree – and the idea of being on the receiving end of Oliver’s weird brand of guilty pity is profoundly uncomfortable.

When she doesn’t elaborate, Diggle half-smiles and says, “Well, I guess that’s one benefit of working for the most taciturn guy in Starling City – whatever stuff you’ve said and regretted, it’s almost guaranteed that he’ll never bring it up again.”

“Nope,” she agrees, relieved. “He’ll just dump a million dollars in your bank account and run off to an uninhabited island.”

“Yeah, not exactly the most emotionally healthy way of handling things,” Diggle concedes.

She taps her fingers on her chin speculatively. “I still can’t decide if that amount means, ‘thanks for being a great friend and not spilling my secret’ or ‘this is probably what I owed you in overtime anyway’.”

John glances up at the salmon ladder. “I’m thinking both of those with a side of, ‘paying people off is an easier way of dealing with my soul-crushing guilt than actually going to therapy’.” He holds out a hand, and they climb to their feet together. “Either way, he’ll be hoping we follow his lead and never mention it again. Even if it will be obvious what you’ve spent yours on.” He gestures to the new desk, pristine and shiny, just waiting to be loaded up with first class tech.

“Yeah, I guess so – oh!” She winces suddenly. “Oh my god, John, I just remembered that I spent, like, a month telling you to put some of yours aside for AJ instead of using it for all of this – I’m so sorry. You should have just told me to shut up.”

“Felicity,” he says sternly, squeezing her shoulder, “before you spend the next few weeks feeling retroactively bad for every reference you made to Carly, you need to understand that I’m fine. I’m not broken-hearted. And… you were right about a college fund for AJ, and I’m proud to say I took your advice.” He grimaces briefly. “Carly won’t like it, but hey – at least that’s a fight I can put off for another few years.”

She lets him shoo her away from the exercise mats after a while, because he claims he wants to get a feel for the best way to set the area up, but she knows he’s caught her glancing over at the desk more than once. Her fingers reach out to skim the edge, and unexpectedly, a lump catches in her throat. This will be _hers_. Not like her cubicle at work, scattered with knick-knacks and computers that belong to other people. Not like her sunny, messy apartment with too much dust and static to really work on anything more sophisticated than a store-bought laptop with just enough of her own programming to make it a different animal altogether.

Not even like the desk that sat here before, repurposed from somewhere and covered in dents and scratches. She’d been fond of that desk, yes, because of what it represented. She’d even loved the computer that sat on top of it, for the freedom it had given her in finally being able to put her skills to good use.

This time, she can do exactly what she wants.

And _holy crap_ , she has so many ideas.

She’s reaching into her bag for the notepad she’s been sketching in ever since she realised she could make her wildest technological dreams come true when she notices the faint glow coming from her phone. She picks it up and catches a brief glimpse of the message notification before the screen goes dark again.

It’s from Tommy.

Stupidly, she panics, because in that moment the only possible explanation that races through her mind is that something has happened – he’s injured, or sick. Hot on the heels of this idea is one a thousand times worse – that maybe he has done something drastic.

She isn’t sure, in these circumstances, whether a cry for help or a final message goodbye would be more likely.

Truthfully, she doesn’t want to find out.

She squats there, staring at the dark screen, thumb hovering over the home button for who knows how long. It’s the loud _thwack_ behind her that breaks the trance – she turns to see Diggle squaring off against one of the new training dummies.

She knows exactly what he would say if he knew she were frozen here like this. Fortified by imaginary Diggle advice, she swipes at the screen and promptly botches her passcode twice.

She takes a deep breath when the third attempt succeeds, and tries to ignore the nausea rising in her belly. Her messaging app opens automatically. Tommy’s message is short but mercifully unambiguous: ‘Can you find Thea’s new number?’

She stares down at the screen, turn between blissful relief and irrational outrage. Doesn’t he understand that she’s on thin psychological ice here? That every day she is spinning the plates of a million fears and insecurities, and it will only take the tiniest stumble for everything to come crashing down?

No, of course he doesn’t. Because he assumes she’s normal, for one thing, and because he has his own plates to deal with, for another.

She’s about to reply when an addendum to his previous message comes through: ‘Please?’

Felicity snorts softly and types with a steady thumb, ‘Insulted you have to ask. Give me 5 mins.’

Bracing her back against the desk, she reaches for her tablet and lets herself follow the old familiar routines. It would be so easy to pretend, sitting here, that everything has returned to the status quo – that the loud thumps and grunts are not from man versus solid wood, but brawn against brawn (a word she doesn’t particularly like, but accurate nonetheless when it’s wall-to-wall rippling muscles and sweat-slicked skin). Any second now, she’ll get her result and congratulate herself out loud, effectively summoning the two of them over to see what she’s found.

She misses Oliver, but she misses the work, too.

‘That quick?’ Tommy replies, breaking her introspection.

She’s almost there, so she ignores it in favour of investigating Thea’s call and text history. Finding her number had been easy – Thea has been smart in ditching her old phone, especially since the nastier members of the press are known to be especially unscrupulous about not only hacking, but leaking information to the worst possible people in hopes of stirring up drama for the front page, but she has still bought a phone with her own credit card: a rookie mistake – and Felicity certainly isn’t going hunting for gossip, but she’s more than a little worried about Oliver’s sister, and she’d like to at least know she’s safe.

There are hardly any calls or texts from the last few weeks, which suggests she’s staying in one place, hiding. Felicity doesn’t blame her.

Interestingly, though, the main recipient of these calls and texts appears to be Roy Harper. Felicity _really_ wishes that she could somehow overwrite the memory of seeing his head hanging low with bitter defeat as he invites a murderer to end his life.

A little quick detective work via GPS tells her that they’re together right now, in a residential block right on the edge of the Glades. It’s an area that survived mostly intact, but it’s still supposed to be uninhabited right now while city volunteer teams check every property for structural and electrical safety.

Lots of people have ignored that advice. For most, she imagines that it’ll be difficult to trust anybody in power ever again.

Felicity’s glad that Thea has somebody. She wouldn’t have known what to do if Thea had been alone. Approaching Tommy and essentially forcing her way into his life is one thing; storming the Queen mansion and demanding to be allowed to pester the highly protected heiress is another exercise in stupidity altogether.

She retraces her steps, covering her tracks, and she’s almost there when a couple of numbers in Thea’s call history catch her eye. They’re local numbers, and they look slightly familiar, but she can’t remember why. Felicity frowns, and makes a note on her tablet, closing out of everything in Thea’s system. She texts Tommy the number quickly, wondering if he’ll make a comment about the fact that it’s been nearly eight minutes.

He doesn’t reply. She rolls her eyes, unsurprised but still a little annoyed.

When she does the most basic search for the unidentified numbers, though, she forgets all about Tommy’s gratitude (or lack thereof).

One is for a well-known contractor whose name Felicity has seen on scaffolding across the city, and the other is for Reynolds & West, Verdant’s main supplier.

“Dig,” she calls out, hardly raising her voice but knowing he’ll hear her nonetheless. “I think we’re about to have a problem.”

 

* * *

 

Tommy doesn’t call Thea, and he hadn’t planned to. He’d just wanted her number, just in case, but if somebody put him in a room with her right now, he has no idea what he would say.

‘Sorry our parents killed a bunch of people and your brother abandoned you at the worst possible time?’

Even inside his head, his own flippancy brings a guilty sting. Five hundred people, they’re saying. Or, actually, five hundred and two. That’s not exactly ‘a bunch’.

It’s hard to comprehend, Tommy finds. His nearest equivalent in terms of sheer scale is one of those really big summer galas, like the ones the Queens used to host in association with one of Starling City’s nearest and dearest charities. Moira Queen somehow managed to pick the perfect night every time, he remembers; warm and dry, with just enough of a breeze that the old dears didn’t keel over into a rose bush or something.

He remembers sneaking off with Oliver to the media room, playing Mario Kart and Grand Theft Auto until Raisa caught them and – after reducing the two of them to begging, pleading children – was persuaded not only to leave them alone but to bring them food which sat in their stomachs for longer than a micro-second.

Five hundred people used to attend those galas.

Tommy tries to imagine leaving the safety of the media room to find that some sort of mini-apocalypse had taken place, and that every single person outside had been killed – not because he’s a twisted person, he thinks (he hopes) but because it’s a scale he understands.

It’s still impossible.

Part of the problem, he recognises, is that he’s been hiding from reality for so long now. It’s nearly two months since the earthquakes, and all he really knows of the aftermath is what he’s seen on TV.

Lou Carracci, Merlyn Global’s CFO, is still trying to contact him. He doesn’t seem to know about Tommy’s new address, and of late, his voicemail messages have been reduced to lacklustre pleas for a return call. Tommy wonders how long it’ll take before he stops trying.

And then what?

Either he watches Merlyn Global collapse into ruin from a distance – the fragments to be picked over and taken by scavengers – or he eventually gets off his ass and at least leaves this goddamn apartment for once. The thought is frankly terrifying.

He glances back down at the phone, not at Thea’s number this time but at the sender’s name.

_Felicity._

It’s actually not the first time he’s found himself staring at his phone, thinking about texting her. He doesn’t know why he’s so uncertain about it all the time – god, if Old Tommy could see him now. He’s pretty sure she’d be happy to hear from him. It’s obvious that she’s worried about him and wants to make sure he’s OK. Granted, a text asking for Thea’s number probably hasn’t been super reassuring, but it’s better than nothing.

She’d been pretty quick, he thinks, a corner of his mouth pulling upwards. She really _is_ good. He wonders why she’s working in IT at some boring Fortune 500 company when she could be a software mogul by now, or maybe one of those intelligence analysts working for the CIA – that sounds kind of cool.

The fingers of his free hand tap nervously against his thigh. Seized by a sudden fit of annoyance, he tosses the phone aside and folds his arms across his chest, scowling. _Such a coward_ , he chastises himself. _Literally two letters – hi. You can’t even do that._

God, what is he doing, anyway? Forming some kind of weird attachment to Oliver’s friend-slash-employee-slash-genius-on-retainer is just, really, the worst idea he’s ever had.

_She brings you food,_ he tells himself. _It’s like some kind of mother complex, probably._

Old Tommy would have had a comment about that. Several, in fact.

Old Tommy can shut his cakehole for once.

New Tommy’s leg bounces up and down as he snatches the phone up again, swiping to the home screen and bringing up Felicity’s last message. Before he can second guess himself, he stabs the keyboard fiercely: ‘Thanks. More than five minutes = free pizza though’

Her reply is oddly shouty: ‘Pizza ALWAYS FREE. Check freezer. VEGETABLES!’

He can’t help his little huff of laughter. He has no idea if that’s an instruction, a threat, or an expletive. Possibly all three.

He texts back: ‘Vegetable pizza?’

‘NO,’ she replies. ‘Microwave sachets. V simple even for you. DO IT.’

‘V offended,’ he tells her. And then, a thrill of nerves gripping his stomach, he adds, ‘Come and supervise.’

There’s a very slight delay before her next message, which is prefaced with a sad face emoji. ‘Can’t tonight – having my abdominal muscles severely tested by a merciless man. Tomorrow?’

Tommy stares down at the words in front of him, blinking as if this might either erase or make sense of them. “What…?” he murmurs aloud, screwing his eyes up tight. “ _What_?!”

The heavy, uncomfortable feeling in his gut is hard to ignore, but he pushes through and tries to find a way to say, ‘Okay, have great sex’ without sounding weird.

His phone pings alarmingly. And then again, several more times.

**FS:** Oh my GOD

**FS:** That sounded so terrible, I can’t believe I hit send on that

**FS:** I’m talking about crunches, I swear, not something weird

**FS:** And the merciless man is my personal trainer… sort of. Oliver’s bodyguard, actually, but he’s my friend, too. So obviously our relationship is totally platonic.

**FS:** I mean, full disclosure, sometimes I stare at him when he’s not wearing a shirt, but I think that’s actually pretty normal given how incredibly built he is. I’d show you a picture but I deleted them all after the police took me in for questioning. Not because they were incriminating, I just didn’t want them to be shown in court in case anybody got the wrong idea.

**FS:** The thing with the police was a misunderstanding, in case you were wondering. Definitely no tangible proof of anything whatsoever.

**FS:** Anyway my point is: crunches. Not sex.

**FS:** See you tomorrow. Please delete these messages and never, ever mention them again.

 

Tommy balls his hands into fists and tries to force the grin from his face by pressing his lips into a thin line.

It doesn’t work.

He goes and eats some vegetables instead.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Posting this makes me realise how much Dig/Felicity I’ve included. I think I may be fighting latent Dig/Felicity shipping urges, which is a problem for a different story because Tommy/Felicity and Oliver/Felicity are going to be more than enough to deal with in this one! I am already underway with Chapter 4 and hopefully it won’t get delayed by four months like this one. In the meantime, I will be beyond grateful for all of your feedback. Hope you’ve enjoyed reading!


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yay, another chapter! The longest one yet, and it didn’t take four months to produce! (Not that this is anything to brag about, I realise.) I actually had a lot of fun writing this one, because I finally got to kick things up a gear between Tommy and Felicity (well, in relative slow-burn terms, anyway). By the way, I am very aware of the fact that people may also be keen to see the Oliver/Felicity side to things – that’s a little difficult to achieve at the moment since he’s still on Lian Yu, but I promise that relationship won’t be neglected once he comes back. There will be some pretty major issues to deal with there, and although I’m looking forward to tackling them, I’m a little nervous too.
> 
> **Side note** – a couple of people, when this story was first published, were concerned that Oliver might be ‘paired off’ with Laurel as a way of providing for him romantically, I guess – I promise right now that this will not happen. Laurel will make a re-appearance later in the story, but she’s on her own path now and won’t be reuniting with either Tommy or Oliver.
> 
> Happy reading!

By Felicity’s calculation, they’ve got maybe a couple of weeks, at most, before Verdant is up and running again. She’s making a habit of monitoring Thea’s communications, and she does feel bad about it, but she can also justify it to herself and manage not to lose sleep, so she figures that means it’s probably the right thing to do, on balance.

The damage to the club isn’t too bad. The contractor has estimated about a week to get it structurally sound, and then Thea is bringing in her own interior designers to restore the rest.

Suppliers will begin making delivery runs towards the end of next week, and Felicity has seen texts suggesting that Thea might re-open as early as the following Saturday.

It’s good, she guesses, for more than one reason. Thea has something to focus on, for a start, and if she can manage to keep Oliver’s club in business then at least they’ll still be able to maintain their cover for Oliver’s basement activities when he comes back (and she’s decided – definitely ‘when’. Optimism all the way, baby.)

The biggest problem it poses, in the meantime, is limited access to the lair for she and Diggle. They’ve got the side door, sure, but with so many people coming and going during the reconstruction they’re bound to be spotted, and without Oliver they’ll have no way of justifying their presence there. They’ll either get arrested or hauled in front of Thea – she’s not sure which is worse – and both scenarios will result in alerting people to the fact that, firstly, their identities as mere QC employees may not be quite so clear cut, and secondly, that there’s more to the basement than meets the eye.

So basically, she and Diggle are going to have to cut back on the time they spend at the foundry. She doesn’t really see any other way around it. It’ll mean foregoing setting up all of her exciting new toys, and Diggle won’t be able to get any benefit out of the training equipment, but they can both live with it for a while.

They’ll have to, it seems.

Diggle seems resigned to the logic of it, when she tells him, but in his opinion the timing couldn’t be worse. “Criminal activity is on the rise,” he says. “It was bad to start with, what with the looting and rioting after the earthquakes, but the police are stretched so thin that it’s becoming obvious to anybody with half a brain that there are plenty of opportunities to get away with murder – sometimes literally. Not to mention…” He hesitates, grimacing.

“John,” she warns him, when it becomes obvious that he’d rather not continue, “if you say ‘not to mention’ and then _don’t_ mention something, you have only yourself to blame if I choose to take cyber revenge.”

He flashes her a quick smile, but his words are heavy when he says, “There have been some reports of… vigilante activity.”

Felicity’s spine stiffens, and for just one second her breath catches hopefully in her throat. Can he possibly mean…?

Dig can read her face like a book, and lets her down gently with a shake of his head. “Mostly idiot kids,” he tells her. “Some of them are trying to do good. But there are a few whose intentions aren’t so pure – and unfortunately they’re just smart enough to be dangerous.”

“What are you saying?” she asks, fighting to keep her voice steady. “You want to get out there again? Put on the hood?”

He braces his elbows on his knees, contemplating. “I don’t know,” he says at last. “This became our mission – all of ours, not just Oliver’s – but the Hood was his identity. It’s the one he created when he started all of this. I don’t know how he’d feel about me using it on my own initiative.”

Unconsciously, she mimics his posture, hand swiping across her mouth as she weighs up both sides of the issue. “I think,” she says slowly, “if it was to save the city, he’d understand. But Dig,” she catches his eyes and pins him with a desperately earnest stare, “if you do this, you’ll have no backup, nobody to help you out. I can come into the field –” she ignores the way he stiffens, his eyes narrowing as he opens his mouth to protest “– run the comms from close by so I can be ready to get you out if it comes to that, but if it goes wrong too quickly or my information is bad…”

“Felicity,” Diggle reaches out and grasps her hand briefly, “I’m not talking about doing this tomorrow. And now that we know what’s happening at Verdant, I think we need to be realistic about doing this at all. If we can’t access the foundry, we’ll have limited supplies and nowhere to go if I – or god forbid, you – get injured on the job.”

In the end, they agree to wait a few weeks, if they can, until Verdant is up and running. Once the club is back in business, its hours of operation will be more predictable and it’ll be easier to get in and out while the employees are distracted by clubgoers. Privately, Felicity hopes that Oliver might be back by then as well.

Before they part ways, Diggle extracts a promise from her that they’ll meet up regularly, not just for training but for lunches and dinners when they can. “Don’t be a stranger,” he tells her, and the sharp look he gives her suggests he knows exactly how hesitant she might be to contact him once reality sets in and they begin to slip away to separate lives.

“I promise,” she tells him, reaching up to pull him into a tight hug.

And so here she is, practically a lady of leisure now that she’s been ‘suspended with a ridiculous amount of pay’ from her second job.

She scrolls through the Contacts list on her phone and is saddened but not that surprised to realise that she has fallen out of touch with almost everyone on it. She drafts messages to a couple of the friends she was closest to (before she started bailing on them and letting their calls go to voicemail) but deletes them before she can hit send.

That chapter of her life is closed now.

Even struggling to pull itself back together after a tragedy, the city is still beautiful in the heat of summer. The parks are full, rich and green, always busy with classes on the lawns – yoga in the morning, Tai Chi and watercolours in the afternoons. People rent pedal boats and circle the lake, laughing and screaming as they lurch and crash into the banks or each other.

Ice cream and frozen yoghurt are suddenly everywhere. Felicity starts taking the bus to work so she’ll have an excuse to walk outside in the sunshine, and she notices at least three new food carts on her route that tempt her with mouth-watering aromas and bright, colourful displays. One of them makes the most incredible iced mochas, and sells little handmade pastries and tarts that frankly, she could eat until they came out of her ears.

She knows she could find plenty of ways to occupy herself, at least for a few weeks, but the truth is, it’s lonely exploring the city by herself. She doesn’t mind seeing couples, but it suddenly seems as though everybody she passes is walking _with_ somebody – friends, siblings, grandparents – and she feels increasingly aware of the empty space on either side. She loves living independently, she always has, and she’s not exactly prone to sitting and sighing about her lack of social life, but the truth is, she’s tired of keeping her observations to herself, of not being able to _share_ the new discoveries she’s making or have the thrill of watching somebody else enjoy them too.

Making friends is going to be difficult from now on, and keeping them even more so.

Naturally, her thoughts turn to Tommy.

She doesn’t know how to begin to characterise their relationship. They’re more than strangers, but less than friends, and she’s not sure if there might eventually be a limit to his trust given that her presence in his life is a direct result of Oliver Queen.

Then again…

She glances at her phone, as she’s found herself doing frequently since last night.

‘Come and supervise’, he’d said.

She wonders if that was a real invitation. Previously he’s almost exclusively made offers of hospitality in the context of her own wishes. ‘You could stay, if you want’, or ‘we could watch a few more episodes, if you want?’ She thinks that’s because he finds it easier to accept her presence as something that’s being forced upon him, as opposed to something that he might actually want.

So – okay, yeah, this might be evidence of some headway.

And who knows, now that her evenings have opened up for the foreseeable future, she might be able to lend some consistency to her visits. Maybe get him to clean the rest of his apartment, or do some exercise, or go _out_ , even if it is just to the street corner and back.

She’s hopeful. She’ll allow herself that.

 

* * *

 

 

Later that night, she knocks on his door and he answers almost immediately.

“Hey,” she greets him, her wide smile involuntary but genuine.

He really is handsome. God, this is going to be a problem if she’s not careful.

He’s still sporting a light growth of stubble, though it’s evidently by choice these days – it’s been a consistent length every time she’s seen it. His hair is getting noticeably shaggy, and tonight it’s sticking up in little wild tufts. In her opinion, he’ll need it cutting soon, or he’ll be in danger of imitating Oliver’s pre-island electrocuted roadkill look (something she wouldn’t wish on even the worst specimens on Oliver’s list, mainly for the sake of the people who would suffer for having to look at it all day).

“Hey,” Tommy says, standing back to let her through, the smallest of smiles playing around his lips. “No pizza?”

She glares at him on her way towards the kitchen, though it probably lacks some punch given that she’s struggling to suppress her grin. “ _No_. There is _stuff_ in the freezer, Merlyn – like, a _lot_ of stuff. It’s so wasteful not to use it.”

“Jeez, okay, _mom_ ,” he replies, and she catches a glimpse of a tiny, secretive smile before he turns away. She frowns, wondering what little private joke he’s entertaining himself with at her expense. “I ate some vegetables,” he says, turning back suddenly to catch her eye, “in case you were wondering.”

She actually hadn’t. She’d assumed he would have ignored that advice along with almost everything else she says to him. She blinks at him, not even trying to hide how surprised – and pleased – she is. “If you tell me you defrosted a lasagne I might actually cry.”

He gives her a long look, then reaches past her to open the fridge.

There are two meals in foil trays on separate shelves.

She's not prepared for the sheer _relief_ she feels, knowing that he has actually taken this relatively independent step towards looking after himself. She turns to stare at him, astonished, and his eyes grow wide. “Okay, I thought you were joking about crying – Jesus, Smoak, do you despair of me that much?”

Alarmed, she reaches up to pat her cheeks, and glares at him when she finds them dry. “Yeah, you're hilarious. Poke fun at the worry-wart, why don't you? That seems fair.”

She's mostly joking, of course, but as she turns to lift the kettle to refill, he catches her elbow gently. “Hey,” he says, “you really do worry, don't you?”

She studies her feet carefully. It's a rhetorical question, she figures.

For a second, his fingers curl into the crook of her arm and tighten reassuringly. “Thanks,” he says eventually. He doesn't tell her he's fine, or that he'll be okay. She can understand that. “Thank you for... thinking of me. For worrying. Even after... everything.”

She turns towards him, lips parted to ask what the hell he means by that, but he's already pulling his hand away and slipping out of the kitchen. She touches the skin of her arm, looking down with a vague expectation of seeing fingerprints, but it's unmarked.

She stares after him at the closed door. _Even after everything_ – does he think she'd blame him, in some way? How can he think that?

If she tells him she doesn't, will he believe her?

She hears the faint noise of the TV and realises that if he's been forcing himself to watch the news, he's probably extrapolating somewhat from the opinion of the popular media. Not for the first time, she wonders what's happening with Merlyn Global. She's taken to watching the business news, mainly because she's trying to work out if QC is going to fall, and if so, where she should apply to work. From what she's heard, Malcolm Merlyn's legacy is barely fit to float on the stock exchange. Investors are dropping like flies, and three board members have cut and run (although all of them remain under federal investigation).

She puts the kettle on and preheats the oven. Out of curiosity, she glances into the cupboards to find them mostly untouched. She isn’t disappointed, not really; she doesn't know what she expected.

Steeling her nerves, she pushes through the kitchen door and goes to join him on the couch. “What's the plan?” She asks casually, tapping her feet against the carpet. “Community? Or something else?”

He scratches his head, squinting at the TV. “I can't remember where we were up to. Early season two?”

She nods, trying to sound casual when she says, “The Halloween episode was the next one, I think.”

It’s actually one of her favourites, but she’s trying not to look too crazed by the concept.

“Oh yeah...” Tommy breathes, throwing a knowing grin in her direction. “You might have mentioned that about nine times the last time you were here.” His eyes are bright and kind when he says, “We could have skipped ahead, you know.”

She shifts, adjusting her legs underneath her and brushing imaginary lint off her skirt so that he won't see the unexpected flush staining her cheeks and neck. She wonders if he knows how different he looks with his eyes all big and earnest like that. How _good_ he looks.

She digs her fingertips into her knees and steels herself to turn back and say, “Well, that'd be cheating, wouldn't it?”

“Ah, a TV purist,” he says sagely. “Okay, next question: DVD commentary or no? Or one of each?”

She eyes him shrewdly. “Have you ever seen it before?”

He shrugs, mouth twisting attractively. “I don't think so. I didn't recognise anything from the last few of season one so I must have stopped watching.”

“Then, no commentary,” She decides. “You should go into this with a fresh view.” She tips her head to catch his eye. “And don't feel pressured to say you like it just because I am practically peeing myself to watch it.”

“Absolutely no pressure,” he says, straight-faced. “Got it.”

The episode is just as funny as she remembers, and Tommy seems to agree. She takes the opportunity to study him, missing vital elements of the plot by memorising the smooth, relaxed appearance to his face when he laughs.

She catches herself abruptly when he shifts on the couch and unexpectedly makes eye contact. “Uh,” she says quickly, hoping her alarm isn’t obvious, “do you want something to drink?”

Instantly, she winces. Wow, not only is that super rude – to offer a drink to the person who _lives_ here – but she is really going to need to work on her casual voice if she’s ever going to go into the field again. Not that she’s lining up for that, but she’d like to think she could handle it, if the situation called for it.

Instead of calling her on it, Tommy says, “I’ll get it, you keep watching. Coffee okay? I only have instant.”

Her eyes widen as he gets up from the couch. Oh, crap, this really isn’t going well.

“No, hold on,” she begins, haphazardly untangling her legs from beneath her and launching herself into his path, “I didn’t mean for – _shit_ –”

One of her legs is dead.

It’s a discovery she makes when she tries to block Tommy’s path to the kitchen and instead nearly falls to her knees. Of course, the rush of painful pins and needles about five seconds later is a useful clue, but she hardly notices because she is _pressed up against Tommy Merlyn’s body_ and – oh god, she was right, except she’s also a total idiot because this isn’t _‘going_ _to be’_ a problem so much as _it already is_.

They’re both still standing, somehow.

Tommy has managed to band an arm tightly around her waist while his other hand grasps her shoulder. She, in a panicked scrabble for purchase, has managed to sink her fingers into the flesh of his bicep, but her other arm is trapped between them, his t-shirt caught and twisted in her death grip.

All of these are minor details, though, compared to the fact that her chest is flattened against his, and the warmth of his body feels… _really_ nice. His fingertips are burning into her hip through her t-shirt, his forearm pressed against the thin strip of bare skin between her skirt and top. Her face is tucked into his shoulder, the crook of his neck just inches away from her forehead. She can feel his breath – still coming in little surprised puffs – against her hairline. How easy it would be to let her head drop – to wind her arms around his neck and actually embrace him for real.

He could probably really use a hug, actually.

His hold is so secure she thinks she could probably stop trying to shift all of her weight onto her good leg and just let him support her, but that would be the last mortifying nail in this coffin of humiliation, and there’s no way she’ll do that.

Instead, she tentatively puts her other foot down, transferring weight when she thinks it’s safe. She straightens, pulling back and out of his arms; she sort of hopes he won’t make eye contact, given that she must be the colour of a beetroot right now.

No such luck.

“You okay?” he asks, ducking his head to meet her gaze. He looks concerned, if a little awkward. “You get a charley horse?”

She grimaces, rotating her ankle in a slightly exaggerated way to emphasise the problem. “It was my fault,” she says, her voice steadier than she’d expected. “I got up too quick.”

To her surprise, she can see spots of high colour on his cheeks. He lifts a hand to the back of his neck, pausing for a second to stare at his palm in consternation before shaking his head. “If I’d known you wanted to make the coffee that bad, Smoak, I’d have stayed out of your way.”

She laughs, and to her ears it sounds weird and forced. “Thanks for saving my butt. Or, you know, my face – which would probably have become _really_ well acquainted with your coffee table, knowing my luck…”

“Anytime,” he says, and she catches a brief flicker of embarrassment in his eyes before he looks away. “Why don’t you sit down? I’ll get the coffee.” He gestures to the TV. “You can go back and catch whatever you missed.”

She takes him up on the offer, partly because she doesn’t trust her legs and also because she needs the time to collect her thoughts.

She has _a lot_ of thoughts.

_You are an idiot,_ she tells herself, _if you think that adding the complication of yet another inappropriate attraction is going to enhance your life even a tiny bit._

Because – yeah, obviously she finds him attractive. She’d be hard pressed to find a straight woman who didn’t. And spending time with him in close proximity was never exactly going to solve that problem, unless he’d turned out to be an asshole, which… couldn’t be further from the truth.

She glances at the closed kitchen door.

She really had wanted to hug him.

_Damn._

 

* * *

 

 

Tommy stares down at his hands as he goes through the motions of preparing the crappy instant coffee he probably won’t even taste.

They still feel warm.

Is that normal, he worries? Maybe there’s something wrong with him, medically. Hypersensitivity, is that a thing? Could he have that? Would that explain why he can still feel every little wrinkle in the fabric of her t-shirt against his palm?

Probably not.

_Okay,_ he tells himself for the nineteenth time, _actually stop thinking about this now._

It was a reflex, obviously. He’d have done the same for an old lady, or that hairy guy who lives across the hall and sometimes falls asleep on the stairs after a late night at the bar down the street. (Actually, maybe not that guy. He smells of despair and feet.) The point is, he’s a normal person who reacted the way a normal person would when faced with somebody about to keel over.

The fact that Felicity Smoak is smoking hot (yeah, he hears it, and he isn’t proud), smells amazing and fits almost perfectly into his arms (with allowances made for the awkward angle at the time) is entirely irrelevant.

He tosses the spoon in the sink, glaring down at the coffee.

_Stop,_ he instructs the mugs, _now_.

When he carries them back out, the episode is paused on a scene he vaguely recognises from earlier, and Felicity’s knees are tucked under her chin as she yawns widely. “Oh, perfect timing,” she says, her words distorted by a smaller follow-up yawn. She reaches out and takes the coffee, and Tommy doesn’t know if it’s deliberate that her fingers manage to avoid his completely.

It’s easy enough to put it out of his mind by focusing on the rest of the episode. Felicity drains her coffee quickly and perks up a little, her eyes brighter and more alert, but he can’t help but notice the way she confines herself to the smallest possible space on the couch. He tries not to feel offended – it probably isn’t personal, he reasons; she’s probably just embarrassed after what happened – but when the credits roll, she gets up and disappears briefly into the kitchen to put a lasagne in the oven, only to come back and curl into that small space again, and he realises she’ll condition herself to do this every time unless he intervenes.

He spends two episodes wondering how to do that without sounding like a creep.

The lasagne is good – way, _way_ better than he’d expected for a frozen meal, actually. The cheese is hot and stringy, just the way he likes it, and the tomato sauce is rich, flavoured with herbs and maybe a little garlic. He devours it like a sacrifice, leaning back when he’s finished to pat his belly and groan with satisfaction. “Man, that was good,” he tells her. “Did you make that?”

“Me? No!” She seems surprised by the question, though she’s obviously pleased by the compliment. “God, no, I’m not exactly gifted when it comes to the culinary arts. My neighbour, Mrs Schwartz, she used to run a deli two blocks away. It’s a liquor store now, I think – she sold up a few years ago to pay for her husband’s care facility. She likes to make stuff for me, though. She thinks I work too hard.” The smile on her face is rueful. “If only she knew…”

Tommy looks at her carefully. He might not know her very well, but he’s willing to bet every meaningful thing he has left that she works harder than she’ll ever admit, probably at high personal cost and to the detriment of her health and sanity, too. She looks tired, even relaxed and laughing at the TV, and while she doesn’t behave like a person desperate for human contact, he’s well equipped to spot the signs of loneliness.

He glances down at the plate by his feet. For two months now, she’s been coming here to check up on him, bringing food and noise and warmth into a lifeless place.

Who, he wonders, is checking on her?

Before he can think better of it, he reaches out and pats the space between them. “Put your feet up, Smoak,” he says easily. “Plenty of room.”

She eyes him cautiously. “Do I look that uncomfortable?”

He shrugs, smiling sheepishly. “Well, yeah. But I figure you can do without another dead leg as well.”

She scrunches her mouth up thoughtfully. It’s upsettingly cute. “I’m wearing a skirt,” she points out.

Tommy draws an ‘X’ over his heart. “I promise I won’t look.”

How he gets through another five episodes without breaking that promise, he’ll never know.

 

* * *

 

 

When she leaves, later, she pauses by the door, her fingers tightening around the strap of her bag as she frowns. “What you said earlier…” she says hesitantly.

Instantly he feels a thrum of panic in his chest for no particular reason. He doesn’t think he’s said anything particularly upsetting – god, he hopes not – but his guilty conscience reminds him of the way he’d held her tight against him and liked it.

Does she know? _Can_ she know?

“About me worrying about you,” she elaborates, “you know, ‘after everything’.” She lifts her hands and curls her fingers into air quotes. “I just thought – I wondered if maybe you thought I would blame you for what happened. I mean, I know people are saying all kinds of stupid stuff, including a lot of people who basically don’t know _anything_ about it, which is really annoying – and I know I can’t speak for them, but I just wanted you to know…” She holds his gaze, solemn determination in her wide eyes. “This wasn’t your fault. No matter what you might think, you weren’t responsible for this. I know you probably won’t believe me, but – you should. You really should, because trust me, I was right in the middle of…” She makes a vague hand gesture, “...all of that. So I think I can make a fair judgement, you know?”

It’s hard to tell if the weird squeezing sensation in his chest and the lump in his throat are down to guilt (the heavy, choking kind he usually feels when he sees a news report about the bodies still being recovered from the Glades, or remembers looking Malcolm in the eye and finally accepting the truth he’d been too stubborn to acknowledge) or because she is saying the words he didn’t even know he was waiting to hear.

He wants to believe her.

And the thing is, he really thinks he could. She’s one of the best people he knows – he doesn’t even have to think twice about that – and he’s pretty sure she wouldn’t lie about something like this, so… does that make it okay? Is it okay to forgive himself because of one person?

He hopes it is. Because he wants to stop hiding, and start living again, and he’s finally starting to think that if he has Felicity Smoak, he can do anything.

Is this how Oliver feels?

Suddenly annoyed, he squashes that thought before it can take root.

She’s still watching him, worried. “Tommy?”

“Thank you,” he says softly. He leans in close, slipping an arm around her shoulders to pull her in for the briefest of hugs. There’s hardly any contact between them this time, but it still feels good to have her right there. “Really, Smoak – thank you.”

When she leaves, he closes the door behind her and presses his forehead against the rough wooden frame.

_Son of a bitch._ He’s in serious trouble.

 

* * *

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The problem with writing a slow-burn relationship is that you start overanalyzing every little bit of physical contact and wondering if it's too far, too fast. I'm dying to know whether you guys think I'm on the right track or not. I really hope I am, because the next couple of chapters are going to really push things forward. Also - bonus personal trainer!Diggle! A gift we can all enjoy ;)


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> FINALLY!!! Oh my god, I am so relieved to be able to share this with all of you. A while ago, I was complaining talking to someone about how much work was affecting my life and my available time to spend on this fic. ‘But’ I said at the time ‘I really do love my job.’
> 
> Not any fucking more, I don’t! It’s been a bloody nightmare for the last two months, and consequently I have had to keep putting off writing even though, frankly, it is the _only_ thing I want to do. I swear, if I can find a way to make writing Flommy fic pay off, I will do it, my friends, and then there’ll be more Flommy fics than anybody is prepared to handle. 
> 
> On the plus side, this chapter is the longest yet. Does that help? Please help me absolve my guilt! Happy reading :)

“Okay,” says Diggle patiently, not even _trying_ to look as though he’s breaking a sweat, “you know when I say keep your shoulder up?”

“Uh-huh?” Felicity pants, fanning her face with one hand and readjusting the backstrap of her bra in a totally undignified fashion with the other.

Diggle gives her a pointed look. “Do I need to define ‘up’?

She wrinkles her nose at him. "Does it involve the words 'not actually helpful' and 'difficult to remember when your friend-slash-attacker barrels towards you at a thousand miles an hour'? Because that's the only definition I'd agree with."

His mouth twitches, which is all the more amusing when he tries to squash it under his 'serious personal trainer' persona. "It does help," he argues. For the hundredth time today, he motions for her to adopt the basic stance he'd taught her.

Felicity sighs, and makes a show of slumping her back and rolling her eyes like a sour teenager. She catches Dig's eye and grins, straightening. "Be honest, am I your worst pupil ever?"

Dig pauses and pretends to consider. "Hmm, you might be a close second." He quirks an eyebrow at her. "The first guy thought he was teaching me."

"Mm-hmm." She reaches out to snag her bottle of water from the edge of the training mat. "Is that guy currently sulking halfway around the world in a place that rhymes with 'Schmian Schmoo'?"

Dig mimes applause, bowing his head a little. "No prizes for guessing that."

He keeps her going for another half hour before he finally lets up, and by then she isn't forgetting to keep her shoulder up anymore (although she's pretty sure she'll be hearing the words in her sleep for the next few months). Dig's priority is defence right now, which she absolutely gets, but after dodging blows all afternoon - some of them only by a narrow margin - and a few failed attempts to get out of a hold, she's starting to feel like she needs to restore the balance somehow. Without any real way to do that physically, she has to settle for the battlefield she can dominate without even breaking a sweat.

Dig knows she's helping out Lance and his colleagues by feeding them information - as legally as possible - about new trends or worrying patterns. What he doesn't know, and she'll probably never quite have the courage to tell him, is that she's trying to tip the balance a little further - by acting as directly as she dares.

Most telecommunications are vulnerable to interception and tampering, and the average criminal isn't exactly equipped to fend off Felicity's cyber-attacks. Sometimes it's as simple as depositing a few tiny packets of code, masquerading as an update of some kind, into their datastream. If it registers at all, it will be as a flicker in the cell signal, but the phone retains its function and its speed.

She can do anything she likes with that code.

At first she was cautious and simply set it to disrupt certain processes. It would do nothing more than make apps crash, or screw up the sensitivity of the touchscreen. Now, she's bolder - she can hijack their texts or re-map their GPS, enabling her to alter the original message relating to a drop site, or send their location to the police as an automated anonymous tip. A semi-decent virus would wipe out the phone altogether, but she's learning new ways to be creative. It's exciting, if a little scary.

If Dig ever finds out, he'll be furious.

Sometimes she finds herself role-playing that argument with herself, usually while she's making dinner or cleaning her apartment. It never seems to go well.

It'll be fine, she reassures herself. As soon as her new toys are in play, she'll be able to sell these new abilities as a convenient advantage of sort-of-stolen military-grade piece of software. She shouldn't _have_ to, she thinks, annoyed, but if it saves her the time of having to talk Oliver and Diggle down from their high horses. (Oliver - god, that's an argument she can't begin to role play, mostly because she knows he'll go all scowly and silent until he thinks he's won... but also partly because she can't be trusted to keep those scenarios PG-rated. Fantasy!Oliver always ends up shirtless as a minimum.)

They're using a small private gym close to Dig's house while the foundry is off-limits. She actually kind of likes it, not just because Diggle does, but because it's light and airy, and isn’t packed to the rafters with creepy, hairy beefcakes who stare at her as though her chromosomes give them some kind of right to pass judgement. Most of the time, there's hardly anybody here, so she sweeps her embarrassment to one side and commits as fully as she can to whatever Diggle asks of her.

It's been nice, actually, spending time together outside the foundry, and to her delight, Diggle seems to want to keep in touch just as much as she does. He'll actively seek her out, usually if he hasn't heard from her in a couple of days, but more recently it's become almost habitual for them to text at lunchtime and meet in the evening, depending on her plans with Tommy. A couple of times, he's brought lunch to her at work; the break room is quieter these days with so many people on reduced working hours, so they sit and talk, and deconstruct all the crazy activity that seems to be going on at Queen Consolidated.

Officially, Diggle is still employed by the Queen family rather than QC, but with a number of people fleeing the company in droves either out of principle over Moira Queen's actions, or out of fear that they'll lose their jobs eventually anyway, he's been drafted in to prop up the flagging building security team. It's mind-numbingly boring, he tells her, but it's better than standing guard in the deserted mansion like some kind of empty suit of armour - all show and no tell.

Truth be told, though, that's exactly how she feels working at QC without anybody at the helm. She's never particularly subscribed to the idea that groups of people _need_ a leader to survive, but it's becoming clear that - no matter what Ned Foster tries to tell them at the mandatory 'Corporate Pathfinding' meetings - things are _not_ getting better. She doesn't know what's going to happen once Moira Queen goes to trial, but in the current climate she seriously can't imagine anything other than a guilty verdict being delivered. She hasn't actually seen Walter Steele since that day in the hospital, although she did receive an elegant 'thank you' card about a week later. She doesn’t know the specifics of his relationship status with Oliver’s mother, but the fact that he finally accepted Starling National Bank’s extremely lucrative offer suggests they aren’t likely to reconcile any time soon.

So that leaves Oliver.

She and Diggle haven't discussed this explicitly, but they're both thinking the same thing: if Oliver doesn't come back soon, they may actually have to physically drag him back. She's sure he'd rather be left alone to wallow in what he no doubt perceives as failure, but for the good of the city - and for Oliver himself - Felicity won't allow that.

She might not know _exactly_ what he's going through, but she understands a little something about failure, and how it feels to look at that death toll and feel as though some of the blame lies at her door.

There are some thoughts she isn't ready to face, but unlike Oliver, she knows that running away won't help.

Eventually, when Dig starts to look at her a little too suspiciously - she must have her frowny, determined, 'hacking for freedom' expression on - she closes the cover of her tablet and starts to gather her things. "Dinner tomorrow night?" she offers. "I could cook."

He gives her a soft smile as he holds the door open for her. “I’d love to, but I promised I’d go see Turbo with AJ – he’s been bugging me for weeks, and Carly’s working late tomorrow anyway, so…” He glances at her speculatively. “You want to tag along? I don’t know how you feel about animated snails, but it could be fun.” He squints into the sun as they step outside. “Or I hope it will, for my sake.”

She hesitates, adjusting the strap of her tote bag. “It’s not that I don’t want to, it’s just… isn’t AJ still in his ‘please get back together with my mom’ phase? He might not exactly react well to some strange girl showing up with you.”

Diggle grins. “Nah, he’s a pretty cool kid. Just needed some reassurance that I wasn’t going to disappear on him, that’s all. I think he’d like you.” He nudges her with his elbow as they walk to her car. “Like uncle, like nephew.”

She’s pretty sure she’s blushing, but her face is glowing pink from the exercise and the heat anyway, so he probably doesn’t notice. “Okay,” she says, a little excited. “If you’re sure, I mean.”

Dig looks at her like she’s crazy. “Of course I’m sure,” he tells her. “Are _you_? Did I forget to mention it’s an animated snail movie?”

“Yeah, but… _fast_ snails,” she replies, raising her eyebrows for emphasis. “I’ve seen the trailers, Dig. Did you ever think we’d see the day when Samuel L Jackson would do the voice of a snail? Because I did not.”

“Okay,” he says with a laugh. “I don’t need to bribe you with nachos, then?”

She shrugs, feigning disinterest. “Well, if they’re there, I’ll eat them…”

They part with a hug, making plans to meet at Big Belly tomorrow evening. Traffic is light as she heads back to her apartment, and at a red light she sends Tommy a quick text to say she’ll be with him in a couple of hours, and does he want her to bring stuff for chicken parmesan?

He sends her back a sad face emoji and adds, ‘we said we were going to blitz the rest of season 2! No time to cook! Let’s get Thai’

She grins, delaying her response until she can safely park outside her building. ‘I’ll start making it here, won’t take long. Patience, young padawan!’

His response is startlingly fast. ‘You done for the day? Come over ASAP! We can start early’

_Wow, that was enthusiastic_. She once again stalls for time, spending longer fumbling for her keys than strictly necessary, as she tries to calm the little knot of nerves sitting just under her diaphragm. _He’s being friendly,_ she tells herself forcefully. _This is normal-level friendliness, okay? It doesn’t mean anything._

‘Need to shower!’ she texts back, deleting and re-typing the exclamation mark a couple of times before moving on. ‘Trust me, it’s for everybody’s safety. Be there in an hour?’

In the end, she makes it in about forty-five minutes, her hair roughly towel-dried and piled into a messy bun on the top of her head, chicken parmesan ingredients in a couple of bags. As she gets out of the car, she glances down at her outfit – a bright yellow tank top and navy capri pants – to gauge its susceptibility to irreversible stains, and notices she’s already managed to get a small splash of coffee close to the hem.

She frowns, annoyed and slightly puzzled; her last coffee was at lunchtime – at work, no less – putting it hours and miles away from this top. When she touches it, she realises it’s still damp, and her heart sinks as she looks into the car and sees the remnants of her caramel macchiato from this morning sitting in its cup-holder between the seats. It looks cold, gloopy, and pretty unappealing. Her enthusiastic driving has apparently led the cup to tilt just enough for the liquid to splash over the edge from time to time, and she can see little shiny spots on the parking brake and on the nearby upholstery.

“Great,” she mutters, reaching in to grab it. “Yet another fluid I’ll be hoping they don’t notice on the return check.”

She juggles the bags, the cup and her car keys with some difficulty initially, and when she finally manages to lock the car, she breathes a sigh of relief at this very, very tiny victory.

Her relief is short-lived, because of course, the universe hates her.

At least, she assumes this is why she makes it almost to the front door of the building before tripping on an uneven paving stone, the cup of cold coffee slipping from her precarious grip and upending itself all over her feet.

_Perfect. Just… perfect._

* * *

 

Tommy isn’t an idiot. He knows Felicity will bring stuff to make the chicken parmesan, so he sets the oven to preheat about ten minutes before she’s due to arrive. Despite his protests, he’s actually looking forward to having something home-cooked. It makes him pine for the days – sometimes whole weeks – he used to spend wheedling his way into staying at Oliver’s house, not just because the Queen mansion always felt so much warmer and more welcoming than his own home, but for Raisa’s ability to figure out exactly what he wanted to eat just by looking at him.

Looking back, he’s surprised he survived his teenage years with his sanity relatively intact. If he hadn’t had Oliver and his family, he sometimes thinks he’d be dead by now – pushed to ever-increasing recklessness and misery, finally culminating in the kind of accident that would probably have endangered more lives than just his own. He’d have become one of those tragic statistics recited to bored teenagers, or a half-remembered story told around a campfire. ‘Didn’t you hear? Last summer, Tommy Merlyn got shitfaced and stole a police car from right outside the police station! My brother said he drove it so fast, he lost control on the freeway and rolled all the way down the embankment into the woods at the edge of the national park. They say he was still alive when the wolves found him… Park rangers were finding crunched up bones for weeks. And this campsite right here, this very spot? This is where they found his skull – all smashed in and chewed up – but the craziest thing was… the _eyes_ were still in the sockets…’

Tommy might have dabbled in campfire horror stories before.

Sometimes he feels as though he can barely remember the early years of his childhood. The fragments he has left are the barest scraps of memories – tiny and weirdly distorted, like looking the wrong way through a telescope. His mother, reading in the library. Falling and skinning his knee outside. Malcolm, dressed in a tux, helping his mother into her coat.

How wrong – how _unfair_ is it that his life really began when he lost the two of them? If he hadn’t had Oliver to worry over him, in that awkward boyish way of his, Tommy assumes he’d have slowly died in that house. He barely remembers the names of the staff his father employed. He does recall that the turnover was fairly high once Malcolm returned from wherever the hell he disappeared to, and now he wonders whether they’d seen what he couldn’t until two months ago: a cold, hard man determined only to collect power, make war, and _win_.

Tommy can’t even begin to count the number of times he’d wished – actually, hand-on-heart _wished_ – he’d been born a Queen. He’d felt guilty for forsaking his mother’s memory, but not for long enough to torment him. He’s certain she would never have wanted him to grow up like that. She would be heartbroken to know what became of Malcolm in her absence – or rather, what Malcolm became.

He’s had this train of thought before, and he knows better than to let it run on. There’s nothing to be gained from imposing this level of regret on his memories. Life is what it is, and it will be what he makes of it from now on.

Which, he supposes, surveying his dusty, lifeless apartment, currently isn’t much.

He’d tuned into CNBC today, just out of curiosity. Merlyn Global’s demise isn’t exactly headline news anymore, but its progress is still being closely followed by financial analysts, and even if he mutes the channel he can still see the occasional update on the ticker at the bottom of the screen.

Tommy has been thinking about calling Lou Carracci back. He has no real desire to save MG, either for financial purposes or for the sake of his ‘legacy’. He _definitely_ doesn’t think he has enough knowledge or experience to save a multibillion dollar conglomerate, especially if even expert analysts can’t seem to predict which way the chips will fall.

But maybe, if he’s lucky, he’ll be able to bargain for some of the smaller subsidiaries – just enough to save some jobs and some livelihoods. It won’t undo what his father did, but it might prevent the landslide of Starling City’s workforce into poverty.

The problem is, he can’t reasonably do all of that from inside this apartment. Which, given that he hasn’t actually left the building for weeks now, is a larger obstacle than most people would guess. It isn’t that he’s afraid of setting foot outside – except, okay, he _is_ … but it’s more complicated than that.

Out there, he’ll be lost. The streets probably aren’t safe for him to just wander around; Verdant is closed, he assumes, and Oliver’s house is deserted since Thea practically moved in with that kid from the Glades.

Eventually he’ll have to go back to the mansion.

It’s a truth he’d rather not face, but he acknowledges it nonetheless. He’ll never live there again, he knows that much. The few treasured memories he holds aren’t enough to shake the impression he’ll always carry of that house: cold, lifeless and terrifying. Going back there, however briefly, when he and Laurel broke up had felt like some kind of twisted acceptance of the fate that awaited him.

It says something about the deficiencies of his former life that this place – with its old furniture, crappy lighting, and persistent layer of dust that he has done absolutely nothing about – feels like more of a home to him after just over two months than the house he grew up in ever could.

Of course, it also says something about the company he keeps these days.

He can’t shake the smile that sneaks up on him when he thinks of the person who’ll be occupying the other end of the couch this evening. _Be cool_ , he tells himself, pointlessly opening drawers and closing them again in a fruitless search for purpose. _Maybe don’t grope her this time._

As if on cue, he hears the faint echo of footsteps coming up the rickety stairs. He’s still smiling as he moves towards the door, waiting for her knock so as not to startle her by opening the door too early – or look like a creeper, even though that’s pretty much what he’s doing right now.

Weirdly, he can hear the muffled sound of her voice, and for a second he freezes, thinking she’s brought somebody with her.

Who, though?

His heart leaps and stalls in his chest at the immediate, if illogical, response from within: _Oliver_.

His pulse picks up again at double-speed as he tries to decide how he feels – how he _will_ feel if he opens that door to see Oliver standing there. Honestly, he doesn’t know, and his gut seems to be cycling through excitement and some terrible mix of anger and guilt.

He doesn’t move from his spot, doesn’t lean up to peer through the peephole or press his ear to the door – all he can do is wait, until finally he hears Felicity shuffle up, rustling plastic bags, and then a weird clunky-sounding knock.

It jolts him into action, and even though his hand shakes a little as he pulls the door open, his heart immediately calms at the moment he looks out to see Felicity standing there alone.

Mostly he’s relieved, he finds, but there’s a pang of disappointment there, too.

That’s an emotional battle for another day, thank god.

From the hallway, Felicity quirks an eyebrow at him. “Can I… come in?” she prompts, making an expansive gesture with her full hands. “Or are you going to make me sit outside with some kind of hotplate?”

He opens his mouth to answer – probably not that eloquently, he guesses – when he notices what she’s carrying in the hand she used to knock on the door, and does a double-take. “What happened to your shoes?” he asks in consternation.

Instantly, she grimaces, casting a baleful look at the wedges that hang by coffee-soaked suede straps from her fingers. “A tragic accident,” she grits out, “that perfectly illustrates why the universe hates me.”

“Right…” he says slowly. “So, coffee spillage?”

“Coffee spillage,” she confirms, regarding the shoes with a wistful air. “Right outside your building.” Her eyes snap quickly to his, soft with concern. “Not that I’m blaming you,” she hurries to reassure him, “or your building. They were totally independent factors in the… incident.”

“Right,” he repeats, this time with a grin. As he steps back to let her through, though, he glances down and notices her bare feet with open surprise. He feels like an idiot for not thinking about it sooner, but obviously if she’s carrying her shoes, that means they’re not on her feet, and if they’re not on her feet, then… “You walked up six flights of stairs barefoot?” he asks, incredulous.

“Not bare,” she snarks, shuffling past him. “Very, very covered in coffee. _Cold_ coffee,” she elaborates. “Which, based on past experience, is even more disgusting than hot coffee in a self-spill situation.”

He follows her into the kitchen, still focused on her feet. They’re pretty, he thinks absently, even with streaks of dried coffee splashed across them, little dots peppering her slim calves below the hem of her capri pants. He’s never had a thing for feet before, and he doesn’t think he’s about to start now, but hers are cute. Her bright yellow nail polish matches her top – he likes that.

“You should have called me,” he tells her. “I could’ve… I don’t know, brought you some flip-flops or something. Or at least carried the bags.”

Her glare carries no heat, and she doesn’t hide her the quirk of her lips as she lays out the ingredients on the counter. “I’m not going to drag you up and down six floors for two lightweight bags and the sake of my feet. But… thank you for offering anyway.”

“I would have come,” he argues, and realises – he _would_. Even for something as basic as shoes. As apprehensive as he might feel about the idea of leaving this building, if he knew Felicity was outside waiting for him, he thinks he could pull together the courage.

He’s still pondering how to ask her to be his anti-agoraphobia totem without sounding weird, when she glances down at the oven and makes a little noise of surprise. He’s totally unprepared for the blinding intensity of her smile when she turns to him. “’Let’s get Thai food’ my ass,” she teases, nudging him gently with her elbow. “You totally wanted me to cook!”

Tommy shrugs, scuffing at the floor with his toe and feigning nonchalance. “Let’s not get carried away,” he says. “More like I knew that chicken was going to end up here one way or another, so why fight it?”

She rolls her eyes as she reaches into the cupboard under the sink, pulling out a roll of paper towels. “Hey, can you put that pan on with a little oil?” she asks, tearing off a few sheets and running them briefly under the hot water.

Tommy makes a noise of assent, but he watches her distractedly as she props her hip against the counter and stands on one foot, bending her other leg into something that looks like the type of yoga pose he remembers Laurel doing in front of the TV once. He watches, baffled, as she carefully cleans the sticky coffee from her foot, her eyebrows drawn together in concentration.

Eventually she pauses, and looks up at him from underneath her dark lashes. “Can I help you?” she says, voice low with sarcasm.

He goes with the thought that’s been bouncing loudly off the inside of his skull. “You can use my bathroom, you know.”

He doesn’t expect her to freeze, leg bent stiffly, fingers tightening around the wet cloth as she suddenly avoids his eyes. There’s a weird expression on her face – a cautious mixture of guilt and panic. “Uh…” she says eloquently, “I – I know. I just… you know, I can do this just as well here, it’s not a big deal or anything…”

A thought occurs to him. A brand new, bizarre and fascinating thought, and for one of the first times in his life, he has that strange sensation of knowing that he is absolutely correct before he even speaks. “Oh my god, you have never used my bathroom.”

She jerks upright, her wet foot squeaking and slipping a little on the linoleum. “No!” she exclaims, her face flaming into colour. “No, that’s not… Well, okay, yes that’s true, but it’s not for the reason you think.”

He blinks, taken aback by this unexpected direction. “What reason do I think?” he asks, genuinely curious.

“I mean, it’s not like it’s something weird, you know – like, I don’t have some kind of complex about using other people’s bathrooms, or…” She flounders, apparently trapped in a vortex of embarrassment, “or even _your_ bathroom – it’s not like I have some kind of problem with _you_ , specifically, it’s just that…”

He stamps on the urge to step closer to her, to touch her arm and reassure her. “Felicity…”

She takes a deep breath, meeting his eyes warily. “It’s just that this is my… this is _my_ area, you know?” She waves her hand vaguely towards the wall. “I mean, the living room and the kitchen, those are the only places that I’ve been since I started coming here, and at first I sort of restricted my own access because I didn’t want you to feel like your territory was under threat, or something, and then I left it too long and it would have been really weird to actually ask, so I just… didn’t.”

He has no idea how to process this. “So you’ve just, what? Been holding it in?”

She straightens a little. “I have really good bladder control. One time I had to hold an entire Big Belly Jumbo Ice Blast for, like, three hours while Oliver was embroiled in a hostage situation and I couldn’t leave the computer. Pretty sure I nearly died.”

Tommy stares at her. “I really, really can’t stress this enough – it would be an honour to allow you to use my bathroom or, basically, any room you want if it means your kidneys don’t explode. I’m serious, you can pee _anywhere_ that looks good.”

The smile that brightens her face is encouraging, but she’s still hesitant. “I know, Tommy, and I knew that you would _say_ that, if I asked, but you might not actually feel that way, or… or even if you did, you might regret it later and then feel like you couldn’t tell me.”

“Okay,” he says abruptly, feeling guilty and annoyed at himself for apparently making her feel like the most unwelcome person to ever spend two months on some sort of restricted friend visa. He reaches out to her with one hand. “Come with me.”

She stares at his hand as though it’s decaying. “What?”

“Come with me,” he urges. “Don’t make me do that stupid song, Smoak.”

She pats her hands dry on her capris and slowly, carefully, lifts her hand to slide into his.

He pretends his heart doesn’t hit his ribcage extra hard when he feels her cool, smooth fingers wrapped around his. He tugs her along with him, out of the kitchen (stove definitely off – he sees her double-check) and across the short width of the living room to what he fondly thinks of as the hallway.

It isn’t a hallway, not really – just a boxy little space bordered on opposite sides by doors leading to the bedroom and the bathroom. It isn’t even big enough to swing a teacup pig, let alone a cat, but it gives the illusion that there could be more to this place than four rooms and a really horrible carpet.

“Bathroom,” he announces, reaching out with his free hand to push the door open. “I was keeping it tidy because I assumed you were actually using it, which is why the washbasin is hair-free and there’s a kinda blue colour to the water when you flush.”

She takes a half-step across the threshold and peers around curiously. It’s nothing special, just a toilet, sink and shower, but the look of wonder on her face makes it seem as though it’s the inside of the large hadron collider. “Nice,” she says generously. “You could put a little hanging shower thingy in, you know, for storage.”

When he turns the other way to show her his bedroom, though, she falters and tugs on his hand. “Tommy, it’s okay, you really don’t need to –”

“It’s okay, I want to,” he says, and finds he’s telling the truth. “It’s possibly the most boring bedroom on earth, I promise.”

She’s still somewhat frozen in place, so he aims a gentle kick at the bottom of the door. “Oh,” she says in surprise, when it swings open.

Despite playing it down, he’s still a little defensive. “What?”

In typical Felicity style, she defies expectations by replying, “But this is the best one!”

Tommy blinks, trying to fathom what she could possibly mean by that, when she takes the lead and pulls him to stand in the doorway with her. Space is limited, and he angles his shoulder awkwardly to avoid pressing up against her, but he can still feel the warmth of her skin radiating across the few inches that separate them. At this distance, he can see the faint tinge of bronze to her shoulders and upper arms, and the light dusting of freckles on her skin. Her hair is drying in curls where it has fallen out of the twist; the dark frame of her glasses seems almost delicate as it curves over her ear.

She’s talking. And lifting their joined hands to point at the window. “… the biggest window in the apartment,” she’s saying. “For starters, you can open that one and actually get some real air moving into the room. And it’s got so much more space than I thought there would be from outside. You could put a desk there – or, hey, an exercise bike…”

Tommy observes the plain, functional double bed, the poky closet with a door that won’t quite close, and the small wooden nightstand ornamented only by a single plastic lamp. It reminds him of some of the motels he and Oliver used to crash in when they’d decided that a road trip would be the perfect cure for college boredom, but planned the route so badly that they always ended up in the asscrack of nowhere at 2am.

It’s uninspiring. It’s a place to sleep, and nothing more. Yet Felicity puts her brightly painted foot across the threshold and finds something to be pleased about, something that makes him think he can have _more_.

He squeezes her hand and says, “Hey, if you like it so much, I can move the TV in here?”

She swats him in the belly with the back of her hand. “In your dreams, Merlyn.”

She has no idea.

* * *

 

It’s after midnight when they finish the last episode of season two. The credits are rolling when Tommy says, “I could be on board with Abed and Annie. Well, maybe Han Solo Abed and Annie, anyway.”

“But Han Solo Abed is basically Jeff,” Felicity counters. Her clean, dry feet have remained shoeless, and are currently sitting not two inches from Tommy’s leg. Not that he’s noticed, or anything. “And I’m still not ready to give up on that.”

Tommy squints at the TV. “They’re drawing it out. I bet season four.”

She shakes her head unhappily. “No, still nothing.” Then she claps a hand loudly across her mouth and stares at him with wide-eyed horror. “Oh my god, I’m so sorry,” she gasps. “I am the _worst_ when it comes to keeping quiet about spoilers. I told four people that Sirius died within two days of the book coming out. Ugh, just… don’t let me talk to you about anything. Ever.”

“Felicity, I forgive you,” he says solemnly, the effect broken by his shaking shoulders and the way he presses his lips together against a laugh.

Her eyes brighten with amusement as she reaches out to prod him with her toe. “Shut up,” she grumbles. Her hand drops away from her mouth for only a second, rising back to cover a long yawn. She stretches lazily, whining at the pull on her muscles. “I should go. I didn’t wash the plates, though.”

“You are a terrible houseguest,” he remarks, patting the top of her foot and ignoring the thrill that shoots through him. Then, against his better judgement, he looks over at her and manages to say casually, “You can crash here, if you want.”

She stills in the middle of reaching over to the coffee table to check her phone, eventually retracting her hand and eyeing him carefully. “I… don’t know what to say.”

“Unprecedented,” he deadpans, squirming away from her vengeful toe. “No, it’s no big deal, I’m just saying – it’s late, and it’s Saturday tomorrow, so I’m guessing you’re not working.” He frowns. “Unless you’re doing your… you know, _other_ job?”

She shakes her head. “Can’t. Thea’s renovating Verdant.”

Oh. That’s news to him. “Really?”

“You haven’t talked to her? I thought –”

“Yeah, no – I just wanted her number in case, but I haven’t… found the right time. And I guess it sounds like she’s busy with other stuff, anyway.” He smiles briefly. “Good for her, though.”

There’s no pity in the look she gives him, just sympathy and encouragement. “She’d want to hear from you no matter what she’s doing. In fact, Verdant is the perfect jumping-off point, if everything else feels too… raw.” He gets the feeling the toe-poke she’s giving him now is meant to be supportive. “I bet she misses you. She’s probably wondering how you’re doing.”

This time, he keeps his hand on her foot, his thumb curving round to sit in the arch. “Probably,” he muses. “I’ll call her soon. Just need to work up to it.”

“I don’t mean to push,” she says gently. “And next time… yeah, I’d love to stay, if it’s still okay.”

“Sure. Next time.” He squeezes her foot without thinking, but she doesn’t seem to mind.

Her shoes are dried, if not completely clean, and she slips them back on while Tommy tidies up a little. It’s a little flicker of domesticity, and he suppresses a sigh of disappointment at the fact that she won’t be staying. When he sees her hesitating as she hovers near the door, for a moment he’s hopeful that she might have changed her mind, but instead she fish-mouths uncertainly for a couple of seconds before blurting out, “Dig and I are going to see Turbo tomorrow with his nephew, do you want to come?”

Stupidly, the word he chooses to repeat is, “Nephew?”

“Yeah, Dig has a nephew,” she fails to elaborate. “I mean – Dig is John Diggle, Oliver’s bodyguard – you’ve met him, right? His nephew AJ is eight, and he wants to see Turbo – you know, the one with the –”

“The racing snails, yeah,” Tommy nods. He rubs the back of his neck awkwardly, because yes, he’d love to go, but also no – no, he wouldn’t. “It’s just… there would be a lot of people, right?”

“Oh, yeah, of course.” Understanding floods her face as she nods. “Of course, that was – I didn’t think, I’m sorry –”

“Felicity, it’s fine.” He reaches out to touch her arm in reassurance – just the briefest brush of his fingers against her wrist. He misses the way she swallows roughly, glancing down at her arm for a second, as he presses his eyes closed and pinches the bridge of his nose. “Actually – it’s really not fine, and I… I don’t know what to do. It’s gone on so long now that I don’t even know where to start.”

“Hey,” she says softly, this time taking his hand in hers. “Hey, it’s okay, Tommy. I – just tell me what I can do. Even if you want me to shut up about it, that’s okay.”

He looks at her, his heart and stomach flip-flopping unhelpfully around each other, and the steadiness of his voice surprises him. “I need your help,” he says. “Please.”

Her arms are strong and her skin is soft as she draws him into her warm embrace. “Whatever it takes,” she says, her breath whispering against his ear. “I promise.”

He drops his head to her shoulder and closes his eyes.

* * *

 

That night, he dreams of her.

It’s weirdly simple.

It’s exactly like every night they’ve spent curled up on the couch watching TV, except this time, she’s pressed against his side, legs sprawled over his lap as he pulls her closer with an arm wrapped around her shoulders.

She wriggles a little and lets her head sink down to his shoulder, her cheek warm through his t-shirt. Her breathing is light but he can still feel it somehow, just a little tickle under his chin.

It’s really comfortable. In the dream, he doesn’t even question it. She feels nice and warm, and she smells amazing, some delicious combination of cinnamon and honey and coffee. He draws her closer still and she turns in his arms until she’s embracing him chest-to-chest, her legs pulled up and tucked over to the side. Her breasts are pressing against him; her hair is under his nose and little strands are getting in his mouth.

He doesn’t care. He hugs her tighter, hands rubbing gently up and down her back. Her arms are locked around his neck, her nose and mouth pressed into the dip of his collarbone.

“Stay,” he whispers, surely crushing her by now.

She lifts her head to meet his gaze, and he’s astonished, in these last moments of the dream – the moments in which he’s starting to become aware that this isn’t real – by how clear and bright her eyes are. How warm her smile is.

She looks happy.

She leans forward to press a kiss to his mouth, and he wakes up.

He should feel embarrassed and ashamed right now – and in the morning, he will – but as of this moment, feeling the emptiness of his arms and coolness of his skin, all he feels is bitterly disappointed.

* * *

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Writing this fic makes me super happy, because I basically get to write Felicity having fun relationship-developing scenes with everybody I love! Which, to be clear, will include Oliver as soon as he gets back. I am probably going to tweak the timescale a little over the next few chapters. These events are unfolding during the summer of 2013, which by the way is why Felicity only has four seasons of Community, and is why they are going to see Turbo. But obviously when Oliver got back in October in 2.01, we leapt straight into the events of Season 2, and I need a little more time once he’s back to fully play out the new dynamics between Oliver, Tommy and Felicity, so Oliver will be arriving back somewhat earlier than he did in canon. I don’t have it in me creatively to do a full re-write of Season 2, so while some events from the first few episodes will come to pass, it will come to a conclusion one way or another in, chronologically, the very early part of the season. 
> 
> And yay for a bunch of info you didn’t want or need! Yay!
> 
> Next time: Tommy leaves the apartment! And some other stuff happens as well. As always, reviews/kudos etc are super appreciated and I will love you forever. (By the way, I’m really sorry to anyone whose comment I haven’t replied to previously – I’m really terrible at that, but I will try my best to reply to everyone over the next few days)


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have no excuse. I am a terrible person. (Well, OK, work plays a huge part in the problem, but still.) On the other hand, my soul-crushing guilt tends to lead me to write longer and longer chapters to try and make it up to you, so there’s that, I guess…? Thank you so much to everyone for reading, commenting and leaving kudos – it means such a lot to me, and on days when I am struggling to find time to pee, let alone write the next chapter, I get such a lift when I get your feedback. Happy reading!

“Just ten minutes,” Felicity keeps saying, as if to reassure him. “That’s all – ten measly minutes and then you’re back here for the rest of the day.”

Tommy watches her fondly as she paces and fidgets. It’s kind of adorable, not that he’ll ever use that word where she can hear him. Looking at the two of them, an outsider would assume she was the one who was about to take the giant leap, not him.

“Are you okay?” she keeps checking. “You’ll tell me if you aren’t, right?”

“Yes,” he says with great patience, “I definitely will. Now will you please come and sit down? I’m getting motion sickness without even leaving the apartment.”

She worries at her lower lip as she checks her phone. Mr Diggle sent her a text fifteen minutes ago to say he was on his way, so naturally she’s been checking it at ten second intervals ever since. It’d be driving Tommy crazy if he weren’t getting a real kick out of the fact that she’s in his apartment _during the day_.

Maybe he’s getting cabin fever, but it feels significant in some way. It isn’t even the idea that it’s light outside, because obviously it’s summer, so it’s always light when she arrives. But right now, it’s eight a.m. on a Sunday, and Felicity is _here_.

This makes it real, Tommy decides in a moment of wild, irrational thought. She isn’t a figment of his imagination, coming to visit him at night like some sort of kind, beautiful fairy with a genius-level IQ. Which, okay, is not a thought he’s ever actually had before, but seeing her here – slightly sleepy, t-shirt peppered with pastry flakes from the croissants she brought over – reassures him in a way he hadn’t realised he needed.

“How was Turbo?” he asks, in a bid to distract her. “Full of screaming kids?”

“Actually, no,” Felicity replies, sounding surprised. She puts her phone to one side – Tommy cheers internally – and tucks her feet underneath her as she turns her focus on him. “It was weird – the place was practically empty.” She grins suddenly. “AJ was really into it. Afterwards, he kept pulling his t-shirt up over the back of his head like a little snail shell. God, he’s so cute, I just wanted to squash him.”

Tommy can’t help laughing, his chest feeling amazingly light as he watches her play with her ponytail, embarrassed. His arm stretches along the back of the couch, not particularly to touch her, just… reaching. “You know that’s frowned upon, right?” he teases.

The scornful look she throws him is tempered with a darkly amused smile that makes his mouth feel suddenly dry. “Pretty sure Carly would have forgiven me,” she remarks with a quirk of her eyebrows. “When we left her house, he was running around in the garden making racecar noises and looking for a snail to keep as a pet.”

“I had a pet snail when I was a kid,” says Tommy suddenly, so arrested by the memory that he misses the way Felicity sits bolt upright. “Well, it was an apple snail, and it wasn’t actually _mine_ – it lived in my mom’s aquarium. I never really cared about the fish, but I could watch that snail for hours. It was the closest thing I ever had to a pet.” He shakes his head as if this will dislodge the lump in his throat. “Wow, I haven’t thought about that for years.”

Felicity is scooting closer. “Tommy, I’m so sorry –”

He squeezes her hand briefly and hopes she doesn’t come any closer. He can handle her sympathy, and he can handle having physical contact with her, but he craves one much more than the other, and if he starts wrapping the two things up together it’s only going to make his feelings even more complicated in the long run. “Don’t be sorry,” he tells her. “I don’t have a problem talking about it – at least, not with you.”

She tries to hide how pleased she is, but it’s clearly a struggle. “I didn’t have a pet of any kind…” she says, twirling strands of hair around her finger. “My mom…” She blows out a long breath, her eyebrows telling Tommy at least some of the story. “God, ‘flighty’ doesn’t even begin to describe her, but it’s one of the nicer words I could use, so… Anyway, when I was about eight, she started talking about getting a puppy, and I _really_ wanted one, but I knew it wasn’t a good idea.”

She plays with a loop of hair, tickling her own nose with it. Tommy can just picture her at that age – cute as anything, and whipsmart. “I mean, for one thing, we were… I guess you’d say _squatting_ in a dump of a motel. The health department shut it down and whoever owned it just abandoned it. All kinds of people lived there before it finally got demolished. We were out of there by then, but we lived in some shitty apartments before my mom finally started working at Four Queens and we could afford somewhere better.” She shrugs, guilt casting a familiar shadow across her eyes. “I’m not saying she _couldn’t_ have taken care of a puppy, but it wouldn’t have been the best environment to find out. So I kept talking her out of it.” She squints into the distance, looking thoughtful. “In retrospect, I bet she knew exactly what I was doing, but she never said anything. Typical mom.”

Tommy is silent, his chest painfully tight.

All he can think of is the shattered image he’d built without even consciously doing so – the image of Felicity’s happy childhood home, warm and bright just like her, with parents who loved and supported her, parents who have always waited excitedly for the next stage of her life, whatever that might be.

She doesn’t have that, he thinks. She’s never had that.

She hasn’t once mentioned her father, so Tommy guesses he’s out of the picture one way or another. Her mother sounds warm and loving, but inconsistent enough that Felicity felt driven to essentially co-parent herself. And as for money…

He stops himself there. Money is an uncomfortable subject for most people, and Felicity would be embarrassed enough to know that he is mentally dissecting her life like this, let alone that he has some idea of how difficult things must have been for her.

It’s hard, though, knowing that she and her mother must have struggled when he and Oliver had it so easy, and even harder to realise that there’s absolutely nothing Tommy can do about it in the present day. Whatever her life was before, Felicity was strong enough to pull herself out of it, and determined enough to keep going even without the luxury of solid ground beneath her feet.

Tommy might not have the right to feel proud of her, but that doesn’t stop the feeling swelling in his chest.

Against his better judgement, he slips his hand between hers as she knots her fingers together in her lap. “If we’d known each other then,” he says, the lightness of his tone belying the significance of everything he feels right now, “we could have shared my snail.”

Her sudden laughter delights him and fills him up with warmth. “You’re a good man, Tommy Merlyn,” she says, with mock solemnity. “They don’t make ‘em like you any more.”

“So true,” he remarks gravely. “People are so selfish with their molluscs these days.”

She throws her head back, snorting loudly before dissolving into giggles, and Tommy spares himself two seconds to enjoy the way a flush of colour rises to her cheeks and neck before the sound of her hiccupping suddenly seems like the funniest thing in the world, and he convulses helplessly next to her.

This is how Mr Diggle finds them, some minutes later.

“I texted,” he tells Felicity pointedly from the doorway. “Several times. Then I got worried.” He spares Tommy an unreadable glance. “Seems I didn’t need to be.”

“Sorry, Dig,” Felicity says, her tone reassuring but not overly contrite. “I didn’t even hear my phone. Where are you parked?”

Mr Diggle, Tommy decides, is not someone he particularly wants to piss off. Curiously, the physical threat isn’t the prime motivator for this perspective – though obviously picking a fight with an ex-military bodyguard who now spends his nights hunting down hardened criminals would be suicidal to say the least – but rather, it’s plain to see that John Diggle loves Felicity Smoak with deadly ferocity.

(Tommy wants to say, with conviction, that it’s a purely platonic love, and he’s basically 99% certain. But reserving that little tiny one percent seems like a smart decision, partly because Mr Diggle is readable in the same way that a brick wall is huggable, but also because Felicity is… well, Felicity.)

“Right outside,” Diggle says. “Had to steal the spot right out from under some guy’s nose – I’m surprised you didn’t hear all the screaming.” He pats what Tommy assumes is a concealed weapon under his jacket. “I let him believe I’m a government agent, but honestly, I don’t trust him not to bust the windshield while I’m gone, so we should make a move.”

And just like that, Tommy’s stomach drops through the floor.

This is it.

He has left the apartment before. The trash chute is two floors down, for one thing. For another, he periodically checks his mailbox, even though all he ever gets is fliers for special deals on pizza and carpet cleaning. But even standing in the lobby of the building, looking out through the grimy glass of the front door at the bright sunny street outside, is more than he can handle most of the time.

He’d nearly done it once, more than a month ago now. He’d woken up from a nightmare about CNRI; this time, it had been Oliver under the rubble, and Laurel screaming for Tommy to save him, to pull him out, but Tommy’s arms had been weak and useless. He’d tried so damn hard, but when he looked up, Oliver’s face was grey and slack, and his cheek was cold under Tommy’s fingers. Tommy had woken feeling devastated, tears streaming down his face, but the second reality hit him and he remembered exactly where he was and where Oliver was and _why_ , the grief had swiftly transmuted into an ugly kind of fury.

He hadn’t really known what he wanted to do, except that it involved getting the hell out of that apartment; he’d stumbled down the stairs, bare-chested and wearing only a pair of pajama bottoms, without his keys or his phone. He’d almost craved the idea of fresh, cold air on his skin – had almost welcomed the idea that somebody on the street would recognise him and hurl the sort of abuse he thought he deserved.

But even though he nearly ran down the last flight of stairs, and practically skidded across the floor in his urgency to reach the door, it was the icy hand of fear that had slipped between his lungs and gripped his heart, bringing him to an abrupt halt.

Today, that fear is back, and even though he steadies and slows his breathing, he can still feel the sharp stab of it inside his chest.

Most days, he knows what he’s afraid of – the same stuff most people are, he guesses: being alone. Being hated. Being hurt. But the fear of going outside is all of that and something else entirely. It isn’t just that people might see him and start baying for his blood, or that he’ll suddenly be forced to answer for something he’s still coming to terms with himself. It’s… being untethered. Having nothing, and no-one, to hang onto when he needs to – or, maybe worse, not being able to _get away_ if that becomes a more pressing need.

He hadn’t needed to actually _say_ any of this to Felicity.

Two nights ago, he’d asked for her help and she had more than provided. She had pondered the problem for a few minutes, her nose crinkling in a way that Tommy finds almost unbearably cute, and then proposed probably the only suggestion he would have accepted.

The car currently waiting outside has tinted windows, and bulletproof glass. It is parked – per Felicity’s instructions, and Diggle’s superb execution – as close to the front entrance as humanly possible. All Tommy has to do is reach the car, and then what they do from there is up to him.

“If you want, you can just sit in the car,” Felicity had said. “Maybe the walk from the building to the car will feel like too much, and that’s okay – you don’t have to do any more. Diggle and I will sit in the car with you until you want to go back in.” She’d pursed her lips briefly. “I mean, a target of ten minutes would be good, I think, but you don’t have to get to that if you don’t feel up to it. It’s just an aim to have in mind.”

Old Tommy would have said, ‘what do I get if I win?’

Old Tommy would have been almost pathologically unable to stop flirting with Felicity. Much as Tommy regrets that these are the circumstances in which they have become friends, he’s a little relieved that he never had the chance to screw this up before it even started.

“Or,” she had continued, “if you’re okay with it, we could go for a drive. Not too far, just a couple of blocks, and we can turn around whenever you want. And believe me, if there’s anyone you can feel safe with as your driver, it’s John Diggle. He’s one of the best men I know. I trust him with my life.” Even if Tommy hadn’t know the first thing about Diggle, he’d have believed Felicity entirely by seeing the warmth and sincerity in her eyes. “I’d trust him with my kids’ lives if, you know, I had any. In fact, if I _did_ have kids I’d probably give them to Diggle right from the beginning anyway because god knows they’d be safer with him than with me.”

Tommy disagrees with her on that, but he’s happy enough to put his life in the hands of a man that both Oliver and Felicity trust without hesitation. He might still have some issues with Oliver, but his judgement in this area is pretty sound, Tommy figures.

Felicity squeezes his hand as he pulls himself to his feet. “Ten minutes,” she reminds him quietly. “You can do this, Tommy. And we’re right here.”

She’s right, he thinks. He _can_ do this. It’s just walking, right? He does that all the time, it’s a piece of cake.

Diggle goes ahead of them to check the lobby and the street; for one of the first times since moving in, Tommy palms his keys and locks the apartment door behind them. It feels strangely final as they descend the creaky staircase, Felicity glancing at him over her shoulder every once in a while as if to check that he hasn’t bolted.

Giving in to a previously suppressed urge, he reaches out and tugs gently at her ponytail. “I can do this all the way down, if you want,” he teases. “You know, if that would make _you_ feel better.”

She makes a noise of aggravation and swats his hand away. “Try it, and I’ll fill your Netflix ‘recently watched’ list with Care Bears episodes.”

Tommy shudders, not entirely for comic effect. “You have way too much power,” he tells her, strangely mesmerised by the way her hair swishes from side to side, glimmering in the dim light. “How are you not working for some government agency by now? Wouldn’t they have better toys than QC?”

He can’t see her face, but he doesn’t miss the way her shoulders stiffen as her breath catches in her chest. “It’s… a long story…” she murmurs softly. “I’m not… I don’t want to sound cryptic, it’s just kind of difficult to talk about, so – maybe some other time?”

“Yeah, no, of course,” he hastily backtracks, squashing the flare of panic with its accompanying echo of _shit, shit, shit_. He knows he doesn’t need to freak out about this – Felicity isn’t going to suddenly cut him off because he happened to touch a raw nerve – but it’s an uncomfortable reminder of the fact that their relationship is still a fragile thing at times. Their boundaries are still in flux.

As if she can sense his inner turmoil, Felicity turns to give him a small smile. “Really, Tommy – it’s okay. Honestly, I would probably outright tell you if we weren’t, you know, in the middle of a staircase on our way to a therapy session I basically made up on the spur of the moment.” She looks alarmed for a moment. “Wow, I probably should have actually done some research before I suggested this.”

Sensing the opportunity to distract her, he tweaks the very top of her ponytail and says, “Well, if it’s a choice between you and, you know, a therapist with an actual licence – I still pick you, Smoak. And not just for the view.”

She glares at him as she pulls her phone out of her bag. “Okay, let’s see – Care Bears: Welcome to Care-A-Lot. Episode One…”

“Don’t you dare, Smoak…”

Diggle is tapping his fingers impatiently against his thigh when they finally stagger into the lobby, Tommy making exaggerated lunges for Felicity’s phone but deliberately missing for the purposes of seeing her triumphant expression.

“If you two kids don’t behave, I’m gonna leave you at the side of the road,” Diggle warns, looking mostly serious. “Coast is clear – the city’s practically dead at this hour on a Sunday.”

Suddenly sober at the realisation that he’s actually about to do this, Tommy searches for the anticipated urge to retreat to safety, and finds it to be less compelling than he’d expected. The building is quiet around him, and the street outside is deserted, the sunlight bright and warm even this early. If it weren’t for Diggle and Felicity, he could almost believe that he’s the last person alive on the planet.

It’s a morbid thought, but it gives him the strength to square his shoulders and say, “Okay. Let’s go.”

Diggle goes first, his long strides cutting across the distance with ease. Felicity doesn’t reach out for his hand, as Tommy expects, but stays close. She goes ahead of him through the door, and it isn’t until later that Tommy realises she’s keeping the path both ahead and behind as clear as possible. She’s anticipating that if something happens, he’ll want to run, and that could be in either direction.

The first step is pretty easy, actually. Tommy _wants_ to be outside right now – he wants to breathe in the fresh air and feel the sun on his face. And Diggle is right – it’s like a ghost town outside. He feels calm and in control. The air feels good, and smells clean; in the distance, a blackbird sings, its voice sweet and clear. It isn’t hard to keep walking.

Halfway across the sidewalk, he becomes aware that there’s someone on the other side of the road.

He doesn’t look directly at them, but his peripheral vision tells him that whoever the person is, they’re standing still by a parked car. Tommy doesn’t know if they’re watching him or not. His pulse picks up, and he can feel the sweat on his palms and the back of his neck.

He’s almost at the car when the person takes a couple of steps, and speaks.

Tommy’s heart leaps into his throat; his feet feel frozen to the ground, and instinctively he reaches out for Felicity. She’s by his side in an instant, her hand slipping into his as her sharp gaze darts around the open street, searching for the threat. Ahead of him, John Diggle reacts more to her than to Tommy, tensing and reaching for his weapon.

The person is a short, middle-aged woman.

She is looking down at the ground as she steps away from the car, and Tommy realises she is speaking to a small white poodle who refuses to stop sniffing the highly exotic aroma arising from a storm drain.

Tommy physically deflates, his fingers flexing inside Felicity’s. “Sorry,” he tells her. “False alarm.”

Weirdly, though, he feels a renewed sense of confidence threading through his body, his heart rate settling and his limbs steadying. He doesn’t falter as he crosses the remaining distance, and his hands don’t shake as he climbs into the car.

Felicity slides into the seat next to him, and suddenly he feels overwhelmingly _free_ – the sheer concept of not being inside his apartment anymore seems almost too much to handle. What is he supposed to do now? What does _anybody_ do out here?

“I know they said today would be a record high but I’m just not feeling it,” Felicity muses, her neck crooked at an awkward angle so that she can stare up at the sky. “It’s breezy, right? We’re still getting coastal winds.”

“Highs of 116 degrees,” Diggle says, as though this is a discussion they’ve had before. “They’ll be peeling people off the sidewalks, you’ll see.”

Felicity tilts her head and throws Tommy a conspiratorial wink, mouthing ‘watch this’. “Hmm, Dig, I _wonder_ what the chance of precipitation could be today?”

Dig angles the rearview mirror to give her a sharp look. “Felicity,” he says sternly, “I know what you’re doing. You know damn well it’s zero, you’re just trying to make a point.”

Felicity grins, preening a little with self-satisfaction. “Dig loves five-day weather forecasts,” she tells Tommy, _sotto voce_. “They’re his favourite things after guns and curly fries.”

In the front seat, Diggle makes a low sound of dissatisfaction and glares into the rearview mirror. “I tell you one thing…”

Tommy listens to them bicker lightheartedly, and slowly relaxes. He can almost forget he’s in the back seat of an armoured Bentley outside his apartment block – right now, he could be anywhere. All he knows is, he’s safe and in good company.

And just like that, he knows where he wants to go.

As if she has some kind of special radar for mental breakthroughs, Felicity breaks off mid-sentence and turns to him. “You okay?” she asks, concerned. “Do you need to go back inside?”

“No,” he replies, shaking his head almost in astonishment. “Actually… the opposite. And I was thinking – I’d really like to see Thea.”

* * *

 

_Well,_ Felicity thinks, _this is definitely not super awkward at all._

Thea Queen – who carries herself with the composure of a goddess despite wearing a pair of baggy paint-streaked harem pants and a neon orange tank top – is staring at her from behind Verdant’s bar, mostly curious but possibly a little hostile.

Felicity can’t entirely blame her, but at the same time she’s starting to feel a little wronged here.

When Tommy had said he wanted to see Thea, she’d been surprised but really relieved that he seemed ready to take that step. Reaching out to the Queen sibling who was as good as family to him could be seen as positive – healthy, even.

But she’d been assuming Thea would be at the Queen mansion, and that they would be able to drop Tommy at the front door and then slip around to what Diggle refers to, seemingly in total seriousness, as ‘the servant’s entrance’ to occupy themselves in the interior security office for a while.

Instead, Thea is proving her dedication to her brother’s business by spending her Sunday taking inventory and reviewing the staff directory ahead of the club’s reopening next Saturday. Felicity knows this because, rather than being able to escape down to the basement as she’d hoped, she is stuck sitting on a bar stool next to Tommy and trying to decide whether it would be rude to get her tablet out to play a little sudoku.

“Come on, let me introduce you,” he’d said eagerly, when they’d pulled up outside the club and Felicity had suggested that she and Dig would make themselves scarce. “I think you guys would get along great.”

“We’ve… sort of already met. Just briefly – as in, I didn’t even physically step into the room, but we definitely made eye contact, so…” She’d shaken her head, backtracking. “I went to the hospital to see Walter after he was found. I guess that was nearly three months ago now – she might not remember me…”

“Hard to believe,” Tommy had teased. “Trust me, it’ll be fine – Thea’s a great judge of character.”

Felicity doesn’t regret going with Tommy to support him, but she wishes she didn’t suppress her own feelings so readily all the time. She could have told Tommy that of course it wasn’t going to be as easy as he believed – why would it?

She knows what Thea must see: an awkward, apparently starstruck girl who is trying to attach herself to not one but two rich, handsome men.

Thea has probably met a lot of those in her short lifetime.

“Felicity is my friend,” Tommy had said warmly, when Thea had finally pulled away from the deathly tight hug she’d inflicted on him, her eyes brimming with joy. “She… she’s been helping me. _A lot_.”

And he’d turned to look at her over his shoulder, the gratitude and affection so plain on his face that Felicity had been momentarily struck dumb – a factor that probably hadn’t won her any points with Thea. By the time Felicity had gathered her wits enough to greet Thea directly, she had turned her full attention to Tommy.

So now she’s sitting here feeling like she’s back at school again, all by herself in chemistry lab because no-one wants to partner with her and the popular kids have draped themselves all over her bench to talk to each other, and –

_Okay. Breathe, Felicity. You’re a grown woman in a bar. You have an income. You buy root vegetables and pretend you’re going to use them. You don’t need other people’s attention to validate your existence._

Dig – that sneaky toad – has escaped to the basement because his presence here would be a little hard to explain. Felicity waits for Thea to focus fully on Tommy before palming her phone and stabbing out an angry text with the promise of revenge.

Dig texts back a picture of the cool, spacious basement. It’s almost artistic – a fan of filtered sunlight emerges from behind one of the pillars to illuminate the training area. She feels a pang of something like homesickness, imagining herself down there once again.

She thinks of Oliver.

She misses him in a way that has nothing to do with the weird, complicated feelings she’d been so good at ignoring. She misses the purpose he gave them – the common cause, the fight for something good and _right_ – as well as the ability to push her skills to their limit, then make herself go further and in doing so rewrite her own boundaries.

And yeah, okay, she misses his goddamn abs, too.

But mostly the purpose thing.

“So how do you know my brother again?” Thea’s sharp voice cuts through Felicity’s thoughts and leaves her feeling oddly weightless for a second.

Surprisingly, she doesn’t stumble over her words. “I work at Queen Consolidated,” Felicity tells her, meeting her gaze and holding it, unashamed. “I’m in IT, which is something he had a few… ugh, god, _so_ _many_ problems with after he, you know, _came back_. And I guess we’re sort of friends these days. Or – would be if he were actually here…”

“Right,” Thea says slowly, her eyes sliding back towards Tommy. “And you two…?”

Tommy presses his lips together, annoyed. “Thea, can you stop with this? I already told you she’s my friend, why can’t you just take my word for it?”

Thea glares at him. “Yeah, well, maybe you don’t remember this, Tommy, but last time my brother disappeared, a lot of girls tried to be your ‘friend’, so forgive me if I’m a little sceptical the second time around.”

Tommy blinks, unable to hide his surprise. “What? Thea, that wasn’t _them_ , it was…” And then, bizarrely, he glances briefly at Felicity and appears to swallow his own words. “I mean – look, I made some bad choices back then, but that’s not what’s happening here. Felicity is a good person. She helped your brother, and now she’s helping me. I wouldn’t even have come here today if it weren’t for her!”

Thea flinches, hurt, and Felicity instinctively wants to reach out and explain, soothe the sting of Tommy’s poorly chosen words, but she knows she doesn’t have the right.

Tommy hangs his head, bracing his arms on the bar as he gathers his faculties for another attempt. “I’m sorry, that’s not what I meant. I just – Thea, I have been so lost lately, and I – I am really trying to find my way back to something good.” His voice softens. “I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to have the courage to face you. I should have been here for you, especially with your mom…”

Thea’s self-control wavers, her eyes glimmering with tears, and Felicity feigns extreme focus on her phone to at least give her the illusion of privacy. “What about you?” Thea points out, her voice cracking. “You lost your dad, and I didn’t even visit you in the hospital. I – I left you alone, Tommy, just like Oliver and Laurel. Why aren’t you mad at me? You should be mad at everybody – god knows you’ve got the right. How can you be so calm?”

Tommy shakes his head, and for a moment Felicity thinks they’re both about to cry. She actually thinks it would be really healthy for them, she just wishes she knew how to handle this from an awkward-emotional-moment ‘witness etiquette’ point of view.

When she next glances at them, their hands are knotted together and Thea is swiping at her eyes with the heel of her palm. "God, I am so glad our lives didn't turn into a stupid romantic comedy months ago," she says, voice too thick to sound as dry as she'd probably like. "How embarrassing would this be right now?"

Tommy shifts uncomfortably. "Okay, didn't realise we were going to revisit that any time soon, so I'm... kind of underprepared in terms of witty deflection..."

Felicity stares, unseeing, at her phone.

Tommy and Thea?

God, okay, she definitely isn't hearing this. She isn't even _thinking_ about this.

Except – strange semi-incestuous vibe aside – wouldn’t that have been kind of perfect? If she were in the habit of finding solutions to other people's drama, anyway, and if this life were a work of fiction that could be so easily re-written and _fixed_. She knows it isn't as simple as that, and she wouldn't want it to be, but just for a moment she has to wonder about some other world where Tommy became Oliver's brother in all but blood, and Oliver's reconciliation with Laurel united the three families in some kind of amazing cocktail of power, beauty and intelligence.

They would be unstoppable, Felicity thinks.

"Relax," says Thea, amused, and it takes a moment before Felicity realises she's still talking to Tommy and apparently hasn't picked up on any weird new tension in the room. "I'm over it. Besides, it's not like you and my brother need any more problems between the two of you." Her mouth twists with dissatisfaction. “I can’t believe he just – just up and left like that, after what he did.”

For one horrible stomach-dropping moment, Felicity thinks Oliver’s worst nightmare has come true – that Thea has somehow found out about his other identity, and knows that he killed Malcolm Merlyn.

Unable to help herself, her gaze slides towards Tommy, and to her surprise he’s looking right back at her, her own growing horror mirrored in his eyes.

Thea continues, mercifully oblivious, “Actually, you know what? I can totally believe it. Ollie’s spent all year running from everything while the rest of us just have to _deal_. Sleeping with Laurel might not even be the worst thing he’s done since he came back.” She winces, glancing at Tommy apologetically. “Sorry.”

“It’s fine.” Tommy is unable to fully mask his relief, and sounds incongruously chirpy as a result. “Okay, maybe not _fine_ , but – I’m getting over it.” He straightens a little, as if this might help prove his point. “Thea, I didn’t come here to talk about Oliver – I came to see you. I know it can’t be easy right now, with your mom in custody and Walter… wherever he is. I want to be able to help you out however I can. You don’t have to do this alone.”

The slight tinge of pink to Thea’s cheeks is easily hidden by the dim lighting behind the bar. “Actually, I’m not –”

A loud echoing knock interrupts her, and Thea glances over her shoulder at the small corridor towards the staff entrance. “Damn, they’re early,” she mutters. “I still needed to clear space.”

“You need a hand?” Tommy practically falls off his stool in his haste to make the offer. “I used to be pretty good at this, remember?”

Felicity, somewhat resigned to her lonely role as a silent observer, is a little startled when Thea turns to her and says, “How’s his ribcage?”

She blinks, too taken aback to notice Tommy’s indignant sputtering. Is Thea trying to imply something, or does she genuinely want to know? “I’m not sure I’m the best person to ask,” she replies cautiously. “I haven’t seen him shirtless, if that’s what you mean. Which it probably isn’t, and I’m assuming you actually want to know if he’s okay to do heavy lifting, but the most I’ve ever asked him to hold is a plate of salad, so I don’t think I’m as fully informed as I’d like to be.” Her eyes widen with horror. “Crap, that sounds really creepy. I just mean – you know, fully informed _as a friend_. Which is all we are, right Tommy?”

Tommy is grinning, leaning back entirely too casually for her liking. “I’ll bail you out soon,” he says, waving for her to continue. “Just keep digging for now, I want to see how much worse it’ll get.”

She scowls furiously. “I can’t believe I said you were a good person.”

Thea’s gaze seems noticeably warmer as it flickers between them. “You might not want to burn this bridge,” she warns Tommy. “If you rupture something helping me out, I’m not going to be the one driving you to the Emergency Room.”

Felicity pokes her tongue out at him as he levers himself off the bar stool, rolling his eyes good-naturedly. “Yeah, Tommy,” she goads, “be good and I’ll take you for ice cream after.”

Tommy’s elbow catches her in the ribs as he walks past, and she tries to pretend that his sudden closeness and the faint scent of his cologne aren’t the reason her cheeks feel so warm. She can only hope Thea – who now looks oddly awkward lingering behind the bar as Tommy goes to let the delivery guy in, easily slipping back into his former role – hasn’t taken this as proof of whatever she was obliquely referring to earlier.

As if picking up on this train of thought, Thea presses her lips together, looking sheepish. “I was kind of a bitch before,” she says matter-of-factly. “You actually seem pretty nice, I just – I feel protective of Tommy sometimes.”

Felicity nods. “I know.” She grimaces. “Okay, I don’t _know_ , but – I get it. You guys must be close, especially after everything you’ve been through. Of course you would want to stop him getting hurt. I’m sure he’s protective of you, too.”

Thea’s gaze drifts a little. “Yeah, he is. He’s seen me at my worst – a few times. I know he’d do anything to stop me hitting rock bottom again.” She refocuses, looking back at Felicity. “I’m glad he’s had somebody looking out for him.”

Felicity smiles at her. “I’m glad there are two of us.”

Tommy clears his throat loudly from the store room. “Uh, am I doing this alone, then?”

“Ugh, did you whine this much when you last worked here?” Thea tosses her hair and strides towards the sound of clinking glass and heavy shuffling. “Put your back into it, or I’ll start playing fast and loose with stories of your sordid past.”

Tommy grumbles under his breath, but within minutes Felicity can hear the two of them laughing and talking as though they’ve never been apart. Her phone pings quietly – another alert, another car theft. Small potatoes on the scale of what they’ve previously dealt with, but her program is linking it to a string of similar thefts in the last couple of weeks, and cross-referencing to licence plates appearing at well-known drop sites.

She sighs, preparing to anonymise the information before she sends it to Lance. _No rest for the wicked._

* * *

 

Tommy is practically in orbit heading for the moon when he finally gets back into the Bentley an hour later. He and Thea are thick as thieves again, which is better than he could have hoped for, going in. Not only that, but despite their rocky start, he knows Thea actually likes Felicity – mainly because she’d said the words in the store room as they surveyed the new stock.

“She seems like the kind of friend you need right now.” Thea had grimaced. “God, I feel bad about what I implied earlier. But you know what I mean, right? She’s – kind. And smart. And I think she probably wouldn’t take any crap from you or Oliver, which is always a novelty.” She’d glanced towards the open door, beyond which they could see Felicity with her earbuds in, apparently thoroughly engrossed by something on her tablet. “If she’s responsible for bringing you here today, then I’m grateful, too.” She’d turned to give Tommy a hard look. “And I hope you’re being a good friend to her in return.”

Now, sitting in the back seat of what is essentially Oliver’s car – and doesn’t _that_ lend a strangely illicit air to all of this – Tommy decides that’s exactly what he’s going to be. He hasn’t exactly been winning any prizes in the friend sweepstakes recently, but he can do better – and he will. Starting right now.

“Okay,” he says, twisting on the seat to face her. “We did my thing. Now what about you?”

Felicity frowns, tilting her head quizzically. “Sorry, what?”

“There must be somewhere you want to go, or something you want to do,” he prompts. “I don’t know – lunch? Peewee hockey game? The zoo?”

Her mouth scrunches up as she considers these options. “Honestly,” she says, after a moment, “all I can think about right now is a smoked turkey sub with avocado and cream cheese from Pennisi’s deli.”

In the front seat, Dig’s head lifts with interest.

Tommy shares a brief amused look with Felicity. “Lunch for three it is.”

* * *

 

It catches up with him, of course.

It had been pure luck that the delivery guy must have been new, and had paid almost no attention to Tommy at Verdant. Reynolds and West have been the club’s main supplier since it opened; most of the delivery guys were on first name terms with him and Oliver, and would have had no problems recognising Tommy, even with his new facial hair.

The streets are starting to get busier, but so far nobody has spared the Bentley a glance. Parking over on L Street and walking half a block had felt like a hard-won victory, but at the same time so much easier than he’d thought.

Inside Pennisi’s deli, though, his chickens come home to roost.

There are two customers waiting, and one guy standing behind the counter carefully arranging pastrami on rye. He glances up at them briefly. “Be right with you. Menu’s on the board.”

Tommy dutifully lifts his eyes to the list, but he knows what he’s having.

The smells of toasted bread, smoked meats and melting cheese are unbelievably enticing, and his stomach rumbles faintly. There’s tinny music coming from the small radio behind the counter, and Tommy has almost started to recognise the song when the guy making the sandwich looks up again, and this time does a double-take.

Tommy’s stomach flips, and he’s pretty sure the blood drains from his face.

He knows what’s going to happen now. He can almost see it unfolding in slow motion.

The guy throws down the last pickle in his hand and braces his palms on the counter, his expression twisting with surprise and anger. “You!” He barks, a vein in his forehead rising noticeably. “You – you’re Merlyn’s son, aren’t you? What the fuck is wrong with you?”

Tommy is frozen to the floor, breath trapped in his lungs.

“You have the nerve to stand there and look surprised?” Pastrami Guy sounds incredulous. “Do you even care what you’ve done?”

Felicity’s gaze darts between them, alarmed, and then she signals Dig – standing on the sidewalk outside – with an urgent motion of her hand. Tommy is vaguely aware of her moving to stand in front of him, body-blocking him. “All he did was walk into your store,” she says quietly, calmly. “We’ll leave if you want. But he’s done nothing wrong.”

Tommy mind is wired, his gaze alert and sweeping his surroundings for threats and escapes. He fixes on the man’s face, looking for signs that might tell him to run. The two other customers are watching the show with almost gleeful interest, and he can’t bring himself to look at them.

For a moment, he thinks of Oliver.

Oliver would know what to do right now. He’d know how to get out, or how to fight. He’d be the one protecting Felicity instead of freaking out. Being a hero comes easily to Oliver, apparently.

“Nothing wrong?” the man demands, spittle flying from his lips. “He _murdered_ people! My nephew is barely walking because of you, you son of a bitch.” He wipes his hands aggressively on his apron, gripping the fabric in his fists. “Families like yours and the Queens – we’re all just ants to you. You don’t give a shit who gets stepped on.”

Dig’s massive frame fills up the doorway, and a faint sensation of panic begins to clutch at Tommy’s throat. “Is there a problem here?” Dig asks, voice deep and authoritative.

“We’re leaving,” Felicity says curtly. “We’re not welcome, apparently.” She glances at Tommy with open concern, and her hand slips into the crook of his elbow.

“Damn right you’re not,” Pastrami Guy snaps. “You should seriously consider the company you keep, sweetheart. There’s something wrong with you if you think this guy is worth anybody’s time.”

Dig moves to let Tommy through, and he finds he can breathe a little easier. Felicity’s hand is warm as she guides him to the door; Tommy doesn’t care about changing this guy’s mind, or regaining even a little ground. All he wants is to get out.

But Felicity isn’t quite done yet.

“He didn’t step on you,” she says, full of steely-eyed determination. “It wasn’t him who hurt someone you love. I told you – he didn’t do anything wrong, just had the bad luck to have Malcolm Merlyn for a father.”

Pastrami Guy shakes his head. “Yeah, cry me a river. Just get out. You’re not welcome back here – any of you.”

Outside, Tommy’s legs move automatically, walking him in any direction – any version of _away_ he can get. Despite the sun, he feels chilly and light-headed, and somehow the pavement seems too close to his feet; he stumbles more than once, until Felicity loops her arm tight around his and anchors him.

“I’m sorry,” she says softly. “This was all too much, probably. I mean, that guy – there’s no excuse for him, I think he saw an opportunity to take it out on you. But we’ve done so much today, and I think probably I was pushing too hard –”

“You didn’t,” he interrupts, squinting at her bright blonde hair next to his shoulder. She’s a welcome warmth against the chill of his skin. “Everything we’ve done today, I wanted to do. I just wish…” He trails off, and the silence stretching between them feels interminably long, but Felicity waits patiently for him to come back.

“I wish I could have said _something_ ,” he manages eventually. “Just – anything. Anything not to feel so _weak_.” He hesitates, but something reckless in him forges on. “Oliver wouldn’t have frozen like that.”

If Felicity’s step falters, it’s barely noticeable – but he feels it in the alignment of her hip with his. “Maybe not,” she concedes carefully. “But that doesn’t make him strong. And it doesn’t make you weak.” She squeezes his arm briefly. “I know it might take a while to believe that, but even if you can’t, just know that… I can. And I’ll wait for you to see it too.”

“I…” His breath leaves his chest in a _whoosh_. “I seriously don’t deserve you, Felicity Smoak.”

She grins up at him. “You may regret saying that when I’ve had my eighth coffee of the day and I’m so jittery I can’t find my way out of your apartment.”

Tommy hip-checks her, and they stumble forward a little, giggling. “And this is different to every other night, how?”

She tries to yank her arm from his to smack him, but he holds on tight and refuses to let go, and they stagger along in a zigzag pattern before finally Diggle decides to catch up with them to herd them away from the roar of oncoming traffic. “My eight year old nephew has better road sense than you,” he grumbles, steering them towards the car.

Tommy sobers as they walk, thinking of Thea and the _other_ thing they’d discussed that morning.

“You should come back,” she’d said flatly, after he’d made her rearrange the spirits for a third time. “To Verdant, I mean. To co-manage it with me.” She’d wiped her dusty hands off on her pants and fixed him with a severe look. “Don’t say no.”

“Okay,” he’d replied, nodding.

“Okay, you won’t say no?”

“Okay, I’ll do it. I’d love to.” He’d hardly had to think about it. Just being there in that familiar dusty old storeroom had given giving him pangs of nostalgia. He’d missed being good at something – and doing something he actually liked. There was no reason to say no.

Now, hours later, he fights to school his expression before Felicity asks him what else is bothering him. Because, obviously, he’d been so eager to accept the job – to have a sense of purpose, and returning normality – that he’d failed to remember that co-managing a _nightclub_ will probably have some kind of impact on his evening plans with Felicity.

She’ll be furious with him if she knows he’s regretting taking such a significant step because of _her_ – not to mention guilty – which is why he can’t tell her about the job until he’s psyched himself up enough to convince her that he feels only excitement.

Truthfully, he thinks it’ll be almost impossible.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It has been one of my weirder headcanons that Dig likes weather forecasts. I have no idea why. Thought I’d throw that into the mix for no apparent reason! I love writing Tommy and Felicity so much – I know it probably feels as though they are never apart at the moment, but I swear, they do have lives outside each other. Next chapter: Tommy’s re-employment at Verdant gives him the opportunity to see what Felicity and Diggle have done with the basement. He and Diggle have a frank discussion about a few things. And Felicity and Diggle make a decision about Oliver. See you in a year! (JOKING.) (God, I hope I’m joking.)


End file.
